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Dr. Akash Kumar Lal is the Deputy Director and has been working with Deepak Foundation since the past 9 years. He has domain expertise of Public Health. He has around 13 year of experience in working in various healthcare related projects for Government, International and Civil Society organisations. He has exhaustive experience in healthcare planning, monitoring and evaluation, Quality Assurance Programmes, Project Promotion and Healthcare Research. He has presented papers in various national and international conferences and seminars related to public health.

Dr. Jai Pawar has been working with Deepak Foundation as Director, handling since the past 12 years. She handles projects related to livelihood, skills building, research and development. Has nearly 15 years of experience in implementing Natural Resource Management (NRM) based development projects, ranging from large scale multisectoral (agriculture, water resource development, animal husbandry, and skill building) development initiatives. Has handled ecological restoration and protected area ecology management projects earlier. Has experience in and developed expertise in the following areas: 1) Capacity building of communities, worked with a large number of farmers (especially women farmers), by building their understanding and capacity in sustainable agriculture, allied sectors like animal husbandry and water resource management; and ecology. 2) Collectivization of the communities through Farmer Producer Groups, Women’s Dairy Cooperatives, Village Watershed Committees, Village Health and Sanitation Committees, or Self Help Groups. 3) Liaison with the State and Central Government, implemented Public Private Partnership Projects. She had done PhD in Zoology.

Ms. Archana Joshi is the Director of Deepak Foundation, a registered civil society organization established in 1982.

Her expertise is in the areas of designing projects aimed at achieving sustainable development goals and developing systems for monitoring and evaluation in various development sectors such as public health & nutrition, women’s empowerment, education, skills building & livelihood, disability & special needs and providing disaster relief and rehabilitation. Her major focus is on developing and implementing evidence based intervention research projects. As the Head of the Foundation, she has been instrumental in:

• partnering with various Corporates for implementing their CSR activities since 2012-13
• scaling up the operations of the Foundation to establish Pan-India presence
• designing and implementing large scale public private partnership projects aimed at achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) since 2005
• establishing systems for conducting evidence based research and evaluation
• replicating successful models across various locations
• promoting women entrepreneurship
• policy advocacy

She is a member of the Ethics Committee Technical Review Committee of various academic institutions. She is a member of Internal Complaints Committee on Prevention of Sexual Harassment (POSH) as well as the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) in various Companies and Institutes. She is the fellows of Aspire Circle, a not-for-profit forum that promotes social leadership in India through Fellowships and Research with the purpose of building India’s foremost Social Leadership forum (http://aspirecircle.org/fellows/). She was a member of the World Bank – Health, Nutrition and Population Civil Society Consultative Group (WB-HNP CSCG) from 2013-16. Her research papers are published in several international journals and conference proceedings.

• National Health Systems Resource Centre (NHSRC), New Delhi




• State Institute of Health and Family Welfare (SIHFW), Gandhinagar, Gujarat




• Indian Council of Medical Research, New Delhi




• Foundation for Research in Health Systems (FRHS), Bengaluru, Karnataka




• Indian Institute of Rural Management (IRMA), Anand, Gujarat




• Indian Institute of Public Health (IIPH – G), Gandhinagar, Gujarat




• Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Baroda Medical College, Gujarat




• Department of Pediatrics, Baroda Medical College, Gujarat




• Faculty of Family and Community Sciences, M. S. University of Baroda, Gujarat




• Parul Group of Institutes, Waghodia, Gujarat

• Department of Health & Family Welfare, Government of Gujarat, Gujarat




• Department of Women & Child Development, Government of Gujarat, Gujarat




• Tribal Development Department (TDD), Government of Gujarat, Gujarat




• Gujarat Livelihood Promotion Company (GLPC), Dept. of Rural Development, Gujarat




• Gujarat State AIDS Control Society (GSACS), Ahmedabad, Gujarat




• Water and Sanitation Management Organization (WASMO), Gandhinagar, Gujarat




• School Board, Pune Municipal Corporation, Maharashtra




• National Commission for Women (NCW), Delhi




• Council for Advancement of People’s Action and Rural Technology (CAPART), Ministry of Rural Development, Government of India




• National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), Government of India

• PATH Vaccine Solutions, a non-profit organization and affiliate of Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), Seattle, Washington, USA




• Sanford World Clinics, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, USA.




• Serum Institute of India Ltd. (SIIL), Pune, Maharashtra.




• The World Bank, Washington, USA




• Jan Sawsthya Abhiyan- People’s Health Movement (Secretariat), Gujarat




• Sajjata Sangh – a network of NGOs engaged in Participatory Management of Natural Resources, Gujarat

• * Bombay Public Trust Act, 1950- No. E.3122-BARODA dated November 22, 1982
  Registered under Foreign Registration Act (FCRA), 1976- No. 041960088 dated June 17, 2011
• * Our Ethics Committee is registered under Rule 122DD of Drugs and Cosmetics Rules 1945.
• * The Foundation is committed to contributing its share in social development with compliance to the statutory and regulatory requirements, wherever applicable. We are committed to quality, integrity and excellence in all areas of social services. We pledge to monitor our performance as an on-going activity and strive for continual improvement.

The Foundation is committed to contributing its share in social development with compliance to the statutory and regulatory requirements, wherever applicable. We are committed to quality, integrity and excellence in all areas of social services. We pledge to monitor our performance as an on-going activity and strive for continual improvement.

Hailing from Anjar Bhuj, Gujarat, Naki Rabari completed her graduation from GMN Nursing College in Lakhond Bhuj in 2017. She joined the Certificate Course for Community Health run by Deepak Foundation.

Despite being a mother of a10-month-old baby, Naki decided to pursue the course. Her grit and confidence never stopped her from completing the course. She was facing family-related problems when she had to miss a few classes. She gradually covered the course with the help of her batchmates and teaching faculty. On completion of the course, she is posted at the Community Health Office in Anjar taluka. She is the first woman from her village who took the plunge of enrolling in six months course, leaving behind her infant child with her parents.

11-year-old Sameer Rathodiya (name changed), native of Por village, Vadodara district has been addicted to tobacco chewing ever since he was 5-year-old.  A student of class 5, lives Navinanagri slums where major percent of the population are daily wagers. Mahesh started chewing Tobacco when he was 5-year-old. Deepak foundation works in collaboration with Godrej (Cartiny) in this area for women empowerment and child life skill development. The Foundation conducts awareness and counselling sessions for adolescents and young adults for their development, education health, nutrition, hygiene (WASH), environment issues, life-skills and various career options. Through Deepak Foundation’s intervention, counselling of more than 70 childrens.

Deepak Foundation, has therefore taken the initiative to complement the efforts of the Government in the fight against COVID-19 through an array of relief measures and preventive as well as curative services. The Foundation has been actively providing relief services in over 11 districts across 4 States since the mandatory lockdown came into effect on March 25, 2020.
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Dr Ruchi Mehta is currently head of strategy at Deepak Foundation with a focus on innovative interventions for quality education. She is a promoter of social and economic inclusion of persons with disabilities. Prior to this, she worked in London for 3 years advising the UK government on health policies and the corporate sector on healthcare investments. She did her undergraduate degree in Chemical and Bioengineering from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. At Hopkins, she was a researcher for a $40m Synthetic Yeast Genome 2.0 project and has published in a leading journal Science. While in the USA, she was an active member of Engineers without borders (EWB) and collaborated with South African government bodies and local rotaries to initiate projects for adequate water supply for local deprived communities in South Africa. After her undergraduate studies she went on to do her PhD in Medical Oncology/Surgical Sciences at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof Sir Walter Bodmer (Ex-Chairman, Human Genome Project) at the University of Oxford. While at Oxford, she was awarded the Marie Curie Fellowship and the Horatio Symonds Scholarship.

Ms. Sushma Bhonsale has experience of managing Accounts and Administrative division since the past 28 years. She heads the Accounts Department and manages finances of large scale projects including government grants, foreign funds, and CSR funds. Apart from handling nearly 35 projects of the Foundation, she monitors and analyzes the accounting data and produces the financial reports/statements in compliance with various laws, handles annual audits, and many difficult legal and administrative matters of the Foundation. In addition to the financial matters of the Foundation, over the years she has also gained experience in managing major HR & administrative issues, legal issues in labour court and charity commissioner office.