Bengaluru: Realtor donates Rs 100 crore to Rotary Foundation

Bengaluru, Jul 2: In a major philanthropic gesture, a city-based realtor today donated Rs 100 crore to the Rotary Foundation here for various public projects, including water, sanitation, basic education and child health across the globe.

Son of a freedom fighter, D Ravishankar decided to give away a large chunk of his fortune to change the lives of economically disadvantaged section.

The announcement was made at an event here yesterday.

District Governor of RI district-3190, Suresh Hari, who is also the vice president of CREDAI Bengaluru, told PTI, "Ravishankar's father Kamesh was involved in Vinoba Bhave's Bhudaan movement (Land Gift movement). So his father had a history of donating all his land to the Vinoba Bhave movement and had gone to jail during freedom struggle."

Extolling Ravishankar, Hari said the philanthropist lost his father when he was four years old and was raised by his mother.

Ravishankar has an understanding of the plight of the poor and thus was moved to help those suffering from penury.

Hari said 50 per cent of the fund donated by Ravishankar would be utilised for various charitable activities of Rotary International across the globe while the rest would be utilised in six focus areas including child health.

"The large fund income out of Endowment will be utilised to cover projects across six focus areas such as economic andcommunity development, disease prevention and treatment, water and sanitation, maternal and child health, basic education and literacy and economic and community development programmes," Rotary Club said in a press release.

Ravishankar and his business partner Hari had founded a real estate company called Hara Housing.

Rotary International, said Hari, has come out with an idea to build a corpus fund of 25 billion dollars by 2025 so that year on year the funds collected would be deployed for various charitable activities across the world.