Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation

Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation is a nonprofit organisation based in Karjat, Maharashtra, India. It was established in 1988 by psychiatrist Dr Bharat Vatwani and Smitha Vatwani to provide a rehabilitation home for people with mental illness who were living destitute on the streets. The organisation’s central purpose is to identify vulnerable people, provide psychiatric treatment and rehabilitation, restore their personal and social functioning, and work toward returning them to their families and communities. The foundation emerged from the Vatwanis’ direct encounters with people experiencing homelessness and untreated mental illness. Its founding work was shaped by the recognition that street homelessness could conceal complex personal histories, including education, employment, and family relationships that had been disrupted by psychiatric illness. Rather than treating its residents solely as recipients of medical care, the foundation’s model combines shelter, treatment, rehabilitation, identity tracing, and family reunification. Its work addresses a difficult gap in mental-health and social-care systems: people who are both mentally ill and socially disconnected may have no family member able to advocate for them, no stable home, and limited access to treatment. The foundation seeks to rebuild those links. The organisation has reported reuniting more than 8,000 people with their families since its inception, although the available reference material does not provide a detailed breakdown by year, location, diagnosis, or outcome. Shraddha’s activities depend on collaboration with individuals, institutions, and corporate partners. The available material specifically identifies ValueLabs as one organisation that has worked with the foundation. These partnerships support the foundation’s broader objective of locating, treating, rehabilitating, and reintegrating people who might otherwise remain excluded from family and community life. The foundation is best understood as a mission-led social and mental-health rehabilitation organisation rather than a conventional consumer brand. Its service identity is associated with psychiatric rehabilitation, care for homeless or abandoned people with mental illness, and family reunification. Publicly available reference material provides limited information about its governance, funding, facilities, current leadership beyond the founders, and present programme structure. Accordingly, those details are not asserted here.

Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation was established in 1988 in Maharashtra by psychiatrist Dr Bharat Vatwani and Smitha Vatwani. The founders set out to create a rehabilitation home for people with mental illness who were wandering on the streets without stable housing or family support. Their work was motivated by encounters with individuals whose psychiatric conditions had separated them from their families and obscured their previous identities, education, occupations, and social relationships. The foundation’s approach combines care and rehabilitation with an effort to restore social connections. People entering its care may require psychiatric treatment, shelter, personal identification, and sustained support before they can safely return to independent living or reunite with relatives. The organisation therefore works beyond the immediate provision of a residential place: it seeks to locate families, confirm identities, communicate with relatives, and support the transition back to family life. Based in Karjat, Maharashtra, the foundation has developed its work through cooperation with individuals and corporate partners. The available reference material names ValueLabs among the organisations that have joined hands with the foundation. Such partnerships reflect the organisation’s reliance on a wider support network to address homelessness, mental illness, and family separation together. Since its creation, the foundation has reported reuniting more than 8,000 destitute people with their families. This figure is presented as an overall result since inception; the available sources do not provide a detailed methodology or a year-by-year account. The same sources also offer limited information about the foundation’s current facilities, staffing, funding, governance, and programme expansion. Its documented historical identity nevertheless remains clear: it is a Maharashtra-based nonprofit founded to rehabilitate people with mental illness who are living on the streets and to help restore their family and community relationships.

• 1988

  Foundation established

  [1]Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundationen.wikipedia.org

  Dr Bharat Vatwani and Smitha Vatwani established Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation in Maharashtra to provide a rehabilitation home for people with mental illness who were living destitute on the streets.

• More than 8,000 family reunifications reported

  [1]Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundationen.wikipedia.org

  The foundation has reported reuniting more than 8,000 destitute people with their families since its inception. The available source does not specify the date on which this total was recorded.

A mission-led Indian mental-health rehabilitation organisation focused on restoring dignity, stability, and family connections for people with mental illness who are living without effective social support.

1. 1Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundationen.wikipedia.org