Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (Jaipur Foot)

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti was founded in Jaipur, India, in March 1975 by Devendra Raj (D.R.) Mehta, after a road accident that crushed one of his own legs made him aware of the barriers disabled and underprivileged people face in obtaining artificial limbs. The organization's founding was set to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the nirvana of Bhagwan Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Tirthankara of Jainism, whose teaching of non-violence and compassion for all beings inspired its mission and gave the society its name.

The organization is known worldwide for the Jaipur Foot, a low-cost artificial limb it developed, and today provides artificial limbs, calipers, crutches, wheelchairs and other mobility aids entirely free of charge, operating fitment centres across India and holding fitment camps in dozens of countries beyond it.

Based in Jaipur, it is recognised as the world's largest organization for the fitment of artificial limbs, calipers and other mobility aids provided at no cost to recipients, a scale reached exactly fifty years after Mehta's founding accident. The society's own account frames that scale as a direct continuation of its founding purpose: a free device developed and distributed because its own founder once had none, extended in the decades since to disabled and underprivileged people well beyond Jaipur itself.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Marking its fiftieth anniversary, the Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti's own count, reported by The Federal, states that in fiscal year 2024-25 it fitted 40,078 artificial limbs and other appliances free of charge. That single year's total is part of an organization-wide count exceeding 2.3 million people rehabilitated since the society's founding in 1975.

The figure is the organization's own operational count rather than an independently audited tally, a distinction that matters for a society working at this scale over five decades: the number describes people fitted with devices, not a financial valuation of the free care provided or an outside audit of the count itself.

Fifty years after D.R. Mehta founded it following his own road accident, the society's method has not changed: mobility aids fitted entirely free of charge, distributed through fitment centres across India and fitment camps held in dozens of countries beyond it, still built around the Jaipur Foot he set out to make available to anyone who needed one. The scale is what the society itself points to as the measure of that continuity, a founding purpose from 1975 still driving a count in the millions half a century on.