"My institutions are my places of worship," this is what the great philanthropist Ranada Prasad Shaha used to feel and say regarding the various institutions that he founded.
R P Shaha was born in the village of Mirzapur in Tangail in 1896 to Debendra Kumar and Srimati Kumudini. He was only seven years old when his mother died a painful death from tetanus infection. Lack of medical facilities and poverty contributed to his mother's death which had haunted him all through his life. A hundred years back, he felt the requirement of education --- especially for women, respect for women's right and empowerment of the womenfolk. This is almost what the millennium goal envisages today.
R P Shaha sacrificed his life to see his dreams come true, and it really happened. It has been almost eighty years since he founded Kumudini Welfare Trust. All through these years, the Trust has provided service to the humanity, the suffering masses and the distressed. He created education opportunity for all, and, above everything, rendered service to the state.
His philanthropic activities started centring on his village home. For providing health care to the poor and the needy, R P Shaha established a dispensary in 1938 after the name of his paternal grandmother Shova Sundari. This later got transformed into a modern 750-bed free hospital named Kumudini Hospital. The hospital was inaugurated by the then Governor of British Bengal Lord R G Casey on 29 July, 1944. Subsequently, R P Shaha set up Kumudini Degree College for girls in Tangail in 1943 followed by Debendra College in Manikganj, and Bharateswari Homes, a residential school for girls, in 1945.
During the Bangladesh War of Liberation, this great son of the soil was abducted, along with his only able son, by the Pakistan occupation army and their collaborators on 7 May, 1971. They never returned. The Kumudini family was able to convert its grief into strength and has carried forward the unfinished task of its founder. The Trust has since established Kumudini Nursing School in 1973, Kumudini Handicrafts in 1980, Kumudini Women's Medical College in 2001, Kumudini Nursing College in 2007 and, lastly, the first-ever university in Narayanganj named Ranada Prasad Shaha University (RPSU) in 2014.
A dedicated force of self-sacrificing and hard working workers have evolved around the family of R P Shaha who identify themselves as members of the extended Kumudini family. Together they all are striving hard to materialise the dreams of the founder.
The elder son of the legendary philanthropist Durga Prasad Shaha (1938-1985) was handicapped. All through his life he had to be given family care and was looked after like a child. The entire family had to live with this grief and pain. The Kumudini group is able to understand and share the anguish and distress of the handicapped, and the family to which the child belongs.
The Kumudini family has converted the grief of losing its founder into strength and moved on with his dreams; similarly it plans to overcome the grief of losing Durga Prasad Shaha and work in the field of autism. The work on autism will mainly focus on:
1) Awareness generation
2) Social rehabilitation of autistic children
3) Establishment of an ideal institution for education and training of autistic children
Kumudini
