Bhagat Puran Singh
Founded Pingalwara in Amritsar, a home for the disabled and destitute, after carrying an abandoned disabled child on his back for years.
Bhagat Puran Singh was born Ramji Das in 1904 into a Hindu family in Rajewal, Ludhiana, and grew up in Lahore, where he was drawn to Gurdwara Dehra Sahib and did seva there. In 1924 a four-year-old disabled boy was left at the gurdwara's gate. Puran Singh took him in and for the next twenty-three years carried him on his back wherever he went.
At Partition he crossed to Amritsar with the boy and began caring for the abandoned, the disabled and the dying in a tent near the railway station, begging for food for them. This became Pingalwara, 'the home of the crippled', now one of the largest charitable homes in India, still run on donations.
He wrote and printed thousands of pamphlets on the environment, pollution and soil erosion long before such causes were popular. He received the Padma Shri in 1979 and returned it in 1984 in protest at the army attack on the Darbar Sahib. He died in 1992.