Murlidhar Devidas Amte, later known as Baba Amte, was born into a wealthy landowning family and trained as a lawyer, but grew increasingly disturbed by the treatment of people with leprosy in colonial and early independent India — patients who were often abandoned by their own families and left to beg on the streets, out of widespread fear that the disease was far more contagious than it actually was.
To confront his own fear of the disease directly, he reportedly injected himself with fluid from a leprosy patient's wound and lived among leprosy patients for a period to prove to himself, and later to others, that ordinary contact was not the danger everyone assumed it to be.
In 1949, he founded Anandwan, a settlement in a barren, snake-infested stretch of land in Maharashtra, built initially with the labor of six leprosy patients and a handful of cows, intended as a place where patients could live with dignity, work, and rebuild their own lives rather than depend on charity.
Over the following decades, Anandwan grew into a large, largely self-sufficient community with its own hospitals, schools, and workshops, run substantially by the very patients it had once taken in, later expanding to serve people with other disabilities as well — a model of dignified, self-run rehabilitation still studied today.