One Hundred Years of Selfless Seva

In the autumn of 1925, on the festival of Vijayadashami, a physician in the city of Nagpur gathered a small group of young men in his modest home. There were no banners raised that evening, no formal declarations read out, no elaborate structures put in place. There was a conviction, and the conviction was simple: a society that has come apart cannot hold on to a freedom it wins. Everything that follows on this website begins in that room, with that thought, on that evening.

One hundred years later, the movement that began in that gathering conducts nearly eighty nine thousand daily Shakhas (local branches) across India, gathers volunteers in more than fifty five thousand distinct localities, sustains over one hundred and fifty two thousand service projects, and has inspired some forty national institutions founded by its own volunteers. It has passed through six heads in unbroken consensual succession and has never known an internal split. It has grown to this size without paid employment, credits, without compulsory membership, without external funding, and without a single instrument of compulsion. It grew because ordinary patriots, generation after generation, chose to give a part of their lives to the work of their country and to the wider human family.