Abdul Sattar Edhi

Abdul Sattar Edhi was born on February 28, 1928, in Bantva, a small town in the Gujarat region of British India, into a family of Memon traders known for commerce and charitable giving ^[1]. His mother shaped his conscience early. She would hand him two paisa each day, one for himself and one to give to someone poorer, and she questioned him each evening about how the second coin had been spent ^[2].

When Edhi was eleven, his mother suffered a stroke that left her paralyzed and mentally ill. For eight years the boy fed, bathed, and cleaned her while other children studied and played. He later described this period as his true education, the experience that fixed his attention on the sick and the abandoned. Her death in 1947, when he was nineteen, coincided with the partition of India, and the family joined the vast Muslim migration to the new state of Pakistan ^[1].

The Edhis settled in Karachi, a port city swelling with refugees. The young man sold pencils and matches from a stall, worked as a commission agent trading cloth, and saw around him a city where the poor died on pavements without medical help or burial. He had almost no formal schooling, a fact he never concealed, and he would later say that the misery of Karachi's streets taught him what universities could not ^[3].

In 1951, Edhi used his modest savings to buy a small shop in the crowded Mithadar quarter of Karachi and opened a free dispensary, an eight foot square room where a doctor offered basic care to anyone who came ^[2]. He slept on a bench outside the door so that patients could reach him at any hour. This habit of remaining physically available to the desperate never left him; decades later he still kept a cot beside his office.

A turning point came in 1957, when an Asian flu epidemic swept Karachi. Edhi set up tents on the city's edge and distributed free immunizations and medicine. The public response convinced him that ordinary citizens, not the state, would fund welfare if they trusted the man collecting the money. A businessman's donation soon afterward allowed him to purchase an old van, which he converted into his first ambulance and drove himself through the city, collecting the sick and retrieving corpses that no one else would touch ^[3].

From the beginning he insisted on a rule that defined the whole enterprise: aid without regard to religion, sect, caste, or ethnicity. In a country often divided along those very lines, the Edhi Foundation grew precisely because donors of every background believed their money would reach the needy. Edhi refused funding from governments and formal religious institutions, arguing that such money always arrived with conditions attached ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Abdul Sattar Edhi usually hears first about the ambulances. By the 2000s the Edhi Foundation operated roughly 1,500 vehicles across Pakistan, recognized by Guinness World Records as the largest volunteer ambulance service in the world ^[5]. The white and red vans became a fixture at bomb sites, floods, and traffic accidents, often arriving before police. Edhi himself continued to drive one well into old age, and he personally washed bodies that were decomposed or mutilated when volunteers hesitated.

The foundation's work extended far beyond emergency transport. It ran shelters for orphans, the elderly, and the mentally ill, free kitchens, maternity clinics, morgues, and a graveyard where tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies received burial rites ^[4]. One of Edhi's most controversial innovations was the jhoola, a metal cradle placed outside Edhi centers with a sign urging mothers not to kill unwanted infants but to leave them anonymously. Clerics condemned him for allegedly encouraging illegitimacy; he answered that saving a life outranked judging its origins. The foundation took in tens of thousands of abandoned babies over the decades and arranged adoptions for many ^[2].

Among the most cited Abdul Sattar Edhi achievements is the sheer scale sustained without state support. The foundation ran on small private donations, collected in tin boxes on street corners and counted publicly. Edhi also carried out relief work abroad, sending aid after disasters in Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and the United States, including assistance to victims of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 ^[3]. In 1982 he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for public service, and in 1986 the Lenin Peace Prize followed; Pakistan awarded him the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, its highest civilian honor, in 1989 ^[6].

In 1965 Edhi married Bilquis Bano, a young nurse working at one of his dispensaries. The marriage became a working partnership at the center of the foundation. Bilquis Edhi took charge of the homes for women and abandoned children, supervising nurseries and adoption arrangements, and she became a celebrated humanitarian in her own right ^[7]. The couple raised four children, and their son Faisal Edhi grew up inside the organization he would eventually lead.

Edhi's asceticism was not a public performance but a settled way of life, and it supplies many of the most repeated Abdul Sattar Edhi facts. He owned two sets of clothes, usually a plain grey shalwar kameez, wore an untrimmed beard, and lived with his family in a small apartment adjoining the foundation's Mithadar office. He drew no salary beyond subsistence and refused gifts of land and money for personal use ^[1]. Presidents and generals sought photographs with him; he treated them with the same brisk courtesy he showed a street sweeper.

His bluntness sometimes brought trouble. He criticized religious leaders who, in his view, fed the powerful and ignored the poor, and he described his personal creed as humanitarianism practiced through Islam's command of mercy. During the 1980s, facing pressure and threats in Pakistan's turbulent politics, he briefly left the country before returning to his work ^[4].

Edhi worked past his eightieth birthday with little concession to age, still sitting at a battered desk in Mithadar and answering the emergency telephone himself. In 2013 his kidneys failed, and he began dialysis three times a week at a foundation facility, refusing offers of treatment abroad on the grounds that he would be cared for where ordinary Pakistanis were cared for ^[8].

Honors accumulated in his final years. He was nominated repeatedly for the Nobel Peace Prize, including a 2016 campaign endorsed by Malala Yousafzai, who called him the person most deserving of the award ^[8]. He remained a candidate for it when he died. Public affection cut across every division in Pakistani society: taxi drivers, shopkeepers, and soldiers alike dropped notes into his collection boxes.

Abdul Sattar Edhi died of renal failure in Karachi on July 8, 2016, at the age of 88. In keeping with a pledge he had made years earlier, his corneas were donated and gave sight to two blind recipients. The state accorded him a full guard of honor and a funeral prayer at Karachi's National Stadium, the first state funeral for a private citizen in Pakistan since 1988. He was buried in a grave he had prepared for himself at the Edhi Village graveyard, in clothes he had owned for years ^[6].

Any serious Abdul Sattar Edhi biography ends with an institution rather than a monument. The Edhi Foundation continued its work under Bilquis and Faisal Edhi, its ambulances still first on the scene at Pakistan's emergencies, its cradles still receiving infants, its graveyard still burying the unclaimed ^[7]. Bilquis Edhi carried on the children's work until her own death in 2022, mourned nationally as Mother of Pakistan.

Edhi altered what charity meant in Pakistan. He demonstrated that a welfare system serving millions could rest on the small change of ordinary people, provided its keeper lived transparently and took nothing for himself. The State Bank of Pakistan issued a commemorative coin in his honor in 2016, Google marked his 89th birthday with a doodle seen across the world, and Karachi named streets and medical facilities after him ^[6].

His sayings passed into common speech, above all his reply to critics who asked why his ambulances carried Christians and Hindus: because the ambulance is more Muslim than you. Human rights advocates, journalists, and schoolteachers continue to invoke him as proof that incorruptibility is possible in public life. Nearly a decade after his death, the man who began with an eight foot dispensary remains the standard against which Pakistani philanthropy is measured ^[5].