From an Auto Rickshaw to a Lifeline: The Story of D. Arul Raj
5 min read
Four hours of fares in the morning, four in the evening — and the rest of the day given to the people Chennai walks past.
Karunai Ullangal Trust
founder D. Arul Raj standing beside his autorickshaw on a Chennai street
The man behind the mission
D. Arul Raj drives an autorickshaw in Chennai. That single sentence explains both how modest his means are and how far his reach has become. He founded Karunai Ullangal Trust in 2017 with no office, no funding and no plan beyond a promise he had already begun keeping on his own.
His day is split in two. For roughly four hours each morning and four each evening he carries passengers, and that fare is what keeps his own household running. Everything between those two shifts belongs to somebody else — an elderly man asleep under a flyover, a woman talking to herself outside a bus stand, a body nobody has claimed.
The auto that became an ambulance
In the early years the auto was the whole organisation. It was the vehicle that reached the person, the place where a first meal was handed over, and the seat in which someone rode to a hospital for the first time in years. He learned the city's overlooked geography: which platforms people sleep on, which corners the mentally ill are chased away from, which police stations will help at two in the morning.
A rescue was rarely dramatic. It was a shave and a haircut. A bath and clean clothes. A name asked gently, again and again, until a village or a surname surfaced.
One rescue every single day
He set himself one unrelenting goal: rescue at least one homeless person every single day. Not one a week when time allowed, not one when donations arrived — one a day. That discipline is what turned a personal habit into an institution.
What began with one man and his auto has grown into a movement: more than 15,000 lives touched, over 9,000 elderly people rescued from the streets, and thousands reunited with families who had long assumed they were dead.
The promise, continued
Today a core team of 50 and more than 500 volunteers carry the same promise across Tamil Nadu. There are rescue ambulances now, a women and children's centre, a free old age home, food routes and funeral rites for the unclaimed.
The founder's own routine, though, has hardly changed. The morning shift, the evening shift, and in between — one rescue, one meal, one restored life at a time.
Every rescue is funded by someone like you
A meal, a medical check-up, a ride home — each one has a cost, and none of it is charged to the person being rescued. Donations are eligible for tax exemption under Section 80G.