It Began with a Flood: How the 2015 Chennai Floods Started Karunai Ullangal Trust

In 2015 Arul Raj lost his collection job at a bank. The months that followed were uncertain ones — no salary, no clear next step, and a city that would soon be underwater.

When the rains came and did not stop, he did what many ordinary Chennaiites did: he joined a group of citizen volunteers moving food and water into neighbourhoods the official machinery had not yet reached.

One call changed the direction of his life. A family stranded in Saidapet had gone without food and could not get out. He carried provisions to them through the water — and found, when he arrived, that they were not an exception. Street after street held hundreds of people in exactly the same condition, waiting for someone to notice.

He stayed. Through the flood weeks and the long clean-up that followed, relief work became his full-time occupation, unpaid and unbroken.

When the water receded, the people did not disappear. The elderly man who had nowhere to return to was still on the pavement. The woman with untreated mental illness was still being shooed away from shopfronts. A disaster had simply made visible what the city lived with every ordinary day.

That realisation became Karunai Ullangal Trust, formally founded in 2017 as a secular, non-political charitable trust with a single focus: to rescue, treat, rehabilitate and, wherever possible, take home the people nobody was looking for.