EXTRAORDINARY INDIANS

Five incredible stories of ordinary people changing the world through courage, compassion and service

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Heals On Wheels

Karimul Hak, 54

It isn’t easy living in villages like Dhalabari. Their proximity to West Bengal’s tea gardens might make them a convenient home for those who work on these estates, but their remoteness makes things like quality health care distant, often inaccessible. “Also, my people are very poor. Many of them cannot afford an ambulance, and so they can’t reach a hospital in times of crises,” says Karimul Hak. In 1995, when Hak’s mother suffered a heart attack in the dead of night, he couldn’t arrange for an ambulance despite all his efforts. “I was devastated,” he says. “I took a vow that day. I’d help people in distress.”

Four years later, when a colleague fell unconscious on the tea estate where Hak worked, he borrowed his manager’s motorbike and carried his friend to an emergency ward in Jalpaiguri. “As I saw him recover, I had an idea—I could offer the same service to many more people,” says Hak. In the past 20 years, Hak, 54, estimates he has helped close to 6,000 people reach a hospital in their hour of need. After using a secondhand bike for a few years, Hak bought a TVS110 with a loan he had taken: “The money I’d spend on my mother, I started spending on things like petrol, etc. I was doing this for her.”