Why this Foundation exists.

A note from Mahesh Patil, Founder and Managing Director, on how it began.

The beginning.

The Foundation began, in a sense, long before it was registered. What was registered on 11 June 2021 was the institutional form of a personal practice that already existed — a long-running commitment to direct service, carried on informally and with a small circle of people who shared the commitment.

The transition from personal practice to institutional form was not automatic. It was a decision. The decision was that the work needed to outlive any single individual, and that outliving anyone requires records, accounts, audits, and public accountability. It requires becoming an institution.

What motivates the work.

I trained as a physicist. I have practised martial arts for most of my life. Both disciplines teach the same thing, though they teach it in different vocabularies: that reality does not care about our preferences, and that any progress worth calling progress begins with the humility to see what is actually there.

This is why the Foundation is committed to accountability in the specific form we have chosen — auditable accounts, published reports, verifiable claims. Not because these are trendy virtues in the non-profit world. Because they are the discipline of taking reality seriously.

On the choice of focus.

The Foundation could have chosen a single cause. Many strong Indian non-profits do, and they do valuable work. We chose otherwise, for a specific reason.

Communities do not experience problems one cause at a time. A family that needs medical aid this week may need legal help next month and educational support next year. A farming community facing water stress today may face a crop-loss crisis after the next monsoon. Organising the Foundation around six coordinated focus areas — rather than one — reflects how the problems actually arrive.

This choice makes the Foundation harder to run than a single-cause organisation. It also, we believe, makes it more useful to the communities it serves.

On the AI Mission.

The AI Mission is not a departure from the Foundation’s community work. It is the same work, in a different medium.

The classical Indian traditions we draw on for community programming — the traditions of ethics, of considered decision-making, of responsibility to future generations — have the same relevance to how we build technology that they have to how we run relief camps. The AI Mission is our attempt to demonstrate that relevance in the domain where it may matter most this century.

That the mission is delivered in partnership with Chandrahas Technologies, an independent private company where I have no personal ownership interest and where the CTO Shivam Goswami serves in a dual role, is disclosed in the Foundation’s accounts and governed by a partnership agreement. It is one of the reasons the Foundation’s accountability practices matter.

A personal note.

I do not expect everyone who reads this page to agree with everything the Foundation does. I expect some people to disagree with the AI Mission’s framing; some to disagree with our choice not to pursue partisan political engagement; some to disagree with the specific balance between our community work and our heritage work.

That is as it should be. What I ask is that anyone who wishes to engage with the Foundation — as a volunteer, a donor, a partner, or a critic — engages with what the Foundation actually does, as documented in these pages and in the annual reports. Not with the assumption of what an organisation with our name and orientation must be doing.

Mahesh Patil

Founder & Managing Director

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© 2026 Lok Rakshak Sena Foundation. A Section 8 non-profit registered under the Companies Act, 2013. Registered office: Surat, Gujarat. info@lrsf.ngo