By Mata Press Service

Sipping tea at a Vancouver restaurant, the soft spoken Prem Kumar Khullar takes a break in his search for miracles.
“I am a professional beggar,” said the retired Indian air force squadron leader.
“I need one dollar to send one slum kid to school for one month,” he told the assembled around his table who tried to fathom this ridiculously low request while looking uncomfortably at their $5 lattes and cappuccinos.
Khullar is a man of numbers that shock - tallies that tell the story about the other side of India.
While the world hails the economic prowess of the South Asian behemoth which boasts staggering figures of growth, a burgeoning middle class and fantastical tales of consumption, Khullar’s numbers relay the story of the destitute in wrenching despair.
“Did you know that by next year there will be 93 million people living in slums in India without drinking water, toilets or a roof over their heads on less than 20 Canadian cents a day,” he said.
 “Fifty-two Indian billionaires hold a fourth of India’s GDP today,” said Khullar as he narrated the story of India’s contradictions.
The sprightly senior pointed out that in his homeland of over a billion souls, some 700 million people in 623,000 villages live in abject poverty, many unable to send their kids to school or afford to see a doctor.
“One woman dies every five minutes giving birth…every third newborn is underweight..some 12 million kids aged between 6 and 14 work as child labourers,” he continued with his litany of bleakness.
For Khullar these are the tragic numbers he lives with daily in the town of Behrola, a 90 minute chaotic drive from India’s capital of New Delhi, which has just spent $3.2 billion to stage the Commonwealth Games next month.
For the better part of the last two decades after retiring from the Indian Air Force in 1987, Khullar, primarily armed with a beatific smile has spent his days tending to the poorest of the poor in India, providing them with medicines, books and food.
In 1993, Khullar founded and set up the ABLE Charity Hospital on a piece of land off the road leading to the Taj Mahal city of Agra.
From its humble beginnings and primitive set up, Khullar and his benefactors today have a 50-bed hospital that serves over 25,000 patients a year, many of whom turn up with horrible complications due to malnutrition, neglect and backyard interventions by village midwives.
Able carries out 600 major operations annually for cleft lips, congenital heart diseases, polio affected physical deformities, eye problems in addition to providing pre and post-natal care to thousands of rural Indian women.
Khullar has also established an unlimited medical insurance program for 550 widows, has over 400 orphans in a free education project and recently started a skills course for destitute woman to help them make silk scarves.
“India is unimaginably beautiful, and the people at ABLE are the most beautiful because they serve mankind,” said Khullar, who dismisses any comparison to the iconic Mother Theresa of Kolkata with a wave of his hand.
“My goal is to offer hope to the downtrodden… If I can do a fraction of what she has done, I will be a happy man.”
When not tending to his needy flock in India, Khullar is on a global trek to raise funds for ABLE or as he puts it- ‘the begging tour’.
Over the last month, he has been knocking on doors in England, America and here in Canada to fund the ongoing work at the ABLE hospital and to develop schools in India’s slums.
“Anyone and everyone can help..we are looking for doctors and medical students who can donate their time, money for medical machines and yes the $1 a month to send one kid in the slum to school for one month,” said Khullar.
Khullar’s slum education efforts has so far resulted in eight schools in some of India’s most impoverished communities the past year.
“Many of the poor parents won’t let the kids out of the slums to go to school because they need them to work hauling bricks or herding aimals…By setting up the schools in the slums using abandoned buildings or unused places of worship, we have better success,” said Khullar.
“Our target is to operate 50 schools in the slums with 3,000 children.”
As he works to make India’s staggering numbers of success and adversity add up, Khullar is in Vancouver this week to establish a local chapter for ABLE.
You can reach him at [email protected] or call him at 7787888422 or visit www.ableindiacharities.com.

How you can help

ABLE is a registered charity in Canada, USA, England and India.

ABLE Foundation Of Canada
3633 - 164A Street
Surrey, B.C., V3S 0M1
Canada

Canadian Charity Registration No. 83752 6540 RR0001
                                       (November 06, 2005)

Phone: 7787888422

E-mail: [email protected]
www.ableindiacharities.com