Amravati, Maharashtra · Since 1994
Most of what we do,
we never ask why.
Prayas began with that one question. Thirty years on, it is a place where people come for health, for study, for counselling, for help - and for a reason to keep going.
What Prayas is
Not quite an NGO. An open platform.
We are a voluntary organisation, registered and running since 1994, but the word NGO doesn't describe us well. Prayas is a place people walk into: a student who has nowhere quiet to study, a family managing diabetes, a young person with a degree and no direction, someone caring for a parent with cancer.
The work is run by doctors, counsellors, teachers and volunteers who decided their knowledge was meant to be shared rather than sold. Nothing here is sold to you - no products, no packages.
Where the work goes
Health
Lifestyle disease reversal, a free medical helpline, a lending bank of medical equipment, and support groups for families facing cancer, addiction and sudden loss.
Education
A 24-hour library and study room, a hostel for students who need one, coaching support and sponsorship for bright students from poor families.
Livelihood
Employability training and an employment bureau that places young people, including into social-sector organisations that struggle to find good staff.
Children & youth
Motivation camps, summer camps, Bal Bhavan for children's creativity, and workshops on life skills, parenting and healthy living.
Thirty years, counted plainly
Small organisation. Long innings.
Come to us for
Four things people ask us for most.
8-week programme
Diabetes & lifestyle disease reversal
Live online sessions, daily yoga, a doctor consultation and a peer group - aimed at diabetes, blood pressure, thyroid, obesity and PCOD through food and habit, not products.
How it worksFree · Walk in or call
Medical helpline
Doctors rarely have time to answer everything. Bring your reports and your questions, and get a plain, science-based explanation of what is going on.
About the helplineBy appointment
Counselling
Diet, health, parenting, careers and family - with counsellors and doctors who have spent decades doing this in Vidarbha.
See all sixLend and borrow
Scrap bank
Wheelchairs, walkers, water beds, crutches and commodes, lent free to anyone who needs them. Give what your family no longer uses.
What we collectGet in touch
You can just call.
No form, no queue. Someone at the Bhavan will pick up and point you to the right person.
Prayas-Sevankur Bhavan
Vimalnagar, Farshi Stop,
Amravati, Maharashtra 444606
Helpline · 84216 91842
Email · sevankur@gmail.com
About
A doctor who decided not to charge.
Prayas grew out of one decision taken in 1983 and kept ever since: that basic medical knowledge reaching many people matters more than advanced care reaching a few.
How it began
Dr. Avinash Saoji finished his MBBS at Government Medical College, Nagpur, and then did not open a practice. He also chose not to specialise. He spent the next twenty-two years living and working in villages that had no doctor at all - a tribal village in Dang district in Gujarat, ten years in Madhan village in Amravati district, and twelve years in Chandur Bazar.
In 1994, still based in Chandur Bazar, he registered Prayas as a voluntary organisation working in health and education. The work spread across rural and tribal Maharashtra over the next two decades. In 2007 he moved to Amravati city to take it further, and Prayas moved with him.
MBBS from Government Medical College, Nagpur. Decides against private practice and against specialisation.
Twenty-two years of full-time work in rural and tribal communities across Gujarat and Vidarbha.
Prayas is founded in Chandur Bazar as a voluntary organisation for health and education.
Headquarters shift to Amravati city to reach a larger population.
Prayas-Sevankur Bhavan is completed - five storeys, about 12,500 sq. ft., paid for entirely by well-wishers.
The founder
“Knowledge is meant to be shared, not sold.”
Dr. Saoji grew up in Sindkhed Raja in Buldana district and topped his board in Marathi, Mathematics and Science. Thirty-six years of full-time work in the social sector later, he is known across Amravati, Nagpur and Yavatmal as much for his talks as for his medicine.
His talk series Amhi Bighadalo… Tumhi Bee Ghadana! - loosely, “we broke the mould, you should too” - ran for 36 episodes across three cities and became a book of conversations with people who chose unconventional paths.
What we believe
Health is a balance of four things.
The World Health Organization defines health as physical, mental, social and spiritual wellbeing. Most of us keep score on the first one only, and even that mostly through tests and tablets.
Every Prayas programme - for children, for young people, for adults - is built to pull those four back into balance. We think the imbalance is what the chase for money, power and possessions costs us, and that it is behind a great deal of unhappiness that gets treated as something else.
The building
Prayas-Sevankur Bhavan
Completed in 2014 in central Amravati and built entirely from contributions, the Bhavan is the base for everything we do and an incubation space for new social-sector work.
Library, open 24 hours
A quiet study room for students who have no place to study at home.
Hostel
Residence for students who need one and deserve one.
Workshops
Residential and day workshops on life skills, healthy living, competitive exams, parenting and employability. Fifty people can stay at a time.
Counselling rooms
Child development, parenting, education, marriage, career, nutrition and yoga.
Bal Bhavan
An open floor for children's creativity, and a place where parents talk about how to raise them consciously.
Who stands with us
Supporters and associates
Supporter · Mumbai
Caring Friends
An informal collective of donors started by Rameshbhai Kacholia in 2002 after seeing Baba Amte's work at Anandwan. It backs 30-plus organisations across ten states, chosen only on the quality of their work.
Supporter · California
Arpan Foundation
Channels the whole of every donation to the grassroots institution the donor picks, with nothing taken out for overheads.
Associate · Melghat
MAHAN Trust
Founded in 1998 by Dr. Ashish Satav and Dr. Kavita Satav in Dharni. Serving over two lakh tribal people, it has cut under-five deaths by more than half across 17 villages; several of its methods are now used statewide.
Programmes
What actually runs at Prayas.
Some of it is a formal programme with dates and batches. Most of it is a door you can walk through on a weekday.
Eight weeks · Online · Not-for-profit
Diabetes & lifestyle disease reversal
A structured eight-week programme for chronic lifestyle conditions - type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, hypothyroidism, obesity, PCOD, high cholesterol, arthritis and asthma. The method is food, movement and stress, not medicines or supplements. We sell nothing.
Batches run in English and in Hindi/Marathi on a rolling schedule.
One-to-one first
A consultation with a doctor before the batch starts, so the plan fits your history.
Eight live sessions
Two hours a week on Zoom, plus four monthly follow-ups after the programme ends.
Daily yoga
An hour a day, six days a week, with a trained teacher.
A group that stays
A WhatsApp group of people going through the same thing at the same time.
Useful to have ready before you start: fasting and post-meal blood sugar, HbA1c, lipid profile, thyroid profile, vitamin D and B12. Stay with your own doctor throughout - nothing here replaces medical treatment, and medication changes are only made under supervision.
Free · Amravati
Prayas medical helpline
Patients and families rarely get enough time with the treating doctor to ask what they actually want to ask. What does this report mean? Is this operation necessary? What happens if we wait?
The helpline exists for those questions. Anyone can walk in or call and get a straight, science-based answer from someone with no stake in the decision. We don't prescribe over the phone and we don't take over your treatment - we help you understand it.
The rest of it
Running through the year
Lending pool
Scrap bank
Water beds, wheelchairs, walkers, crutches, commodes and walking sticks, lent free and short-term to patients who need them. We also collect leftover medicines, old spectacle frames, clothes, cycles, blankets and books, and pass them on.
Jobs
Employment bureau
Employability training for young people, and introductions to employers - with a soft spot for social-sector organisations that are always short of good staff. Write to contactprayas@gmail.com.
Students
Library, study room and hostel
Open around the clock for students with no quiet corner at home, and residence for those who need it.
Children
Bal Bhavan and summer camps
A space for children to make things and be heard, plus camps through the year and a running conversation with parents about how to raise them.
Youth
Motivation camps
Residential camps for young people deciding what to do with their lives - the ones who suspect the obvious answer isn't theirs.
Support groups
When life turns
Groups for people and families living with cancer, with alcoholism, and with sudden loss. People who have been through it sit in the room.
Counselling
Six rooms, one appointment.
Sessions are by appointment at the Bhavan in Amravati. Call 94207 22107 and say which one you need - or describe the problem and we'll tell you.
Diet
Forty years of practical advice on eating for weight loss, diabetes, blood pressure, heart disease and autoimmune conditions. We prescribe to the whole family, not to the patient alone - one person eating differently at a shared table rarely lasts.
With: Dr. Avinash Saoji (MBBS) · Dr. Jiwanlal Gandhi (MAFA, ND, BNS - 55 years, four lakh patients) · Rajashree Mohod (MBA, yoga instructor)
Health
What health means when you take the WHO definition seriously - physical, emotional, social and spiritual. Most of what has gone wrong is lifestyle: packaged food, sitting all day, screens late at night, and the quiet loss of family and neighbours to lean on. Most of it is fixable without a prescription.
With: Dr. Avinash Saoji and the Prayas health team
Parenting
Nobody trains for this, and a lot of what feels loving turns out to be the opposite. We work through the real pressures - nuclear households, both parents working, over-pampering, and screens filling the gap.
With: Dr. Avinash Saoji · Rajashree Mohod (MBA, MA Counselling & Psychotherapy) · Devyani & Manoj Govindwar
Education and career
Too many careers are picked by parents or by whatever friends are doing. We start with aptitude, work through a plain SWOT of where a student actually stands, and go on to soft skills or startup mentoring where that's the direction.
With: Mayur Vyawahare (startup founder) · Swapnil Gawande (founder, Deesha) · Dr. Avinash Saoji
Family
Individual and joint counselling for families under strain, plus workshops before marriage, on family life, and on conscious parenting. Weakening relationships are, in our experience, the single biggest source of the dissatisfaction people arrive with.
With: Dr. Adv. Pravin Motiwala (retired Family Court counsellor) · Dr. Avinash Saoji · Rajashree Mohod
Life coaching
For people who are doing fine on paper and know something is off. This is the “why” conversation, held properly, over more than one sitting.
With: Dr. Avinash Saoji
Counselling at Prayas is not emergency care. If you or someone near you is in immediate danger, call the national helpline Tele-MANAS on 14416, or go to your nearest hospital.
Support us
Everything here was paid for by someone who never used it.
The Bhavan was built on contributions. The equipment in the scrap bank came out of people's homes. If you want to add to it, here is exactly where it goes.
Sponsor a programme
Three things we always need funded
Nutrition
Food for chronically ill children
Monthly supplements - dates, groundnuts, sesame, jaggery, pulses - for around twenty children in Amravati district living with chronic illness, including HIV. Immunity depends on food their families cannot afford.
Education
A student's year
School and college fees, coaching, books, uniforms, a device to study on, and hostel and food costs for bright students from poor households.
Treatment
Help for poor patients
Tests, medicines, surgery, travel and food during treatment - mostly for cancer, heart disease, kidney disease and HIV, where costs arrive faster than families can manage.
Other ways to help
Money is not the only thing that's short.
Give equipment. A wheelchair, walker, water bed or pair of crutches that your family no longer needs will be lent out again and again. Unused medicines within date, old spectacle frames, blankets, cycles and books are all put to use.
Give time. Doctors, counsellors, teachers, trainers and people who can sit with a family through a hard month. Tell us what you know and we'll find where it fits.
Hire from us. If you run an organisation and need staff, the employment bureau has trained young people looking for exactly that.
To donate
Write, and we'll send the details.
Email sevankur@gmail.com or call 94207 22107 and tell us what you'd like to support. We'll share bank and UPI details, and send a receipt.
Before you give
Ask us anything about how the money is used. We'll show you the accounts, the audited statements and the registration papers, and you're welcome to visit the Bhavan and see the work running.
Contact
Come and see for yourself.
The Bhavan is at Farshi Stop in Vimalnagar, in the middle of Amravati. Somebody is almost always there.
Address
Prayas-Sevankur Bhavan,
Vimalnagar, Farshi Stop,
Amravati, Maharashtra 444606
India
Phone
+91 94207 22107
+91 721 257 3255
Helpline · +91 84216 91842
Send a message
Tell us what you need
This opens your email app with the message ready to send. If that's awkward, just call.
Visiting
Farshi Stop is on the main road in Vimalnagar and every auto driver in Amravati knows it. If you're coming for counselling or the helpline, call first so the right person is in.