He Found a War Veteran Sleeping on Streets. His Work Now Helps 350+ Defence Families Rebuild Life

A decade later, he has built an organisation that quietly reaches what the system does not — non-pensioner veterans over the age of 60, war widows without income, soldiers living in unfortunate conditions within their own local communities in the remote parts of India.

In 2017, a photograph of an elderly man near Connaught Place in Delhi went viral on social media. The man — later identified as Peethambaran — was hunched on a footpath, one arm resting on a crutch, an iron rod inserted in his hip joint after a rooftop accident months earlier.

Cricketer Gautam Gambhir had shared the image, and the comments section quickly filled with assumptions: that the man was a drunk, a burden, someone who had brought this upon himself.

In 2017, a viral photograph of an elderly man near Connaught Place drew public judgment from strangers who had no idea he was a war veteran.

What the commenters did not know about Peethambaran is that he served the Indian Army as a Signalman in the Signal Corps during the 1965 and 1971 wars. He decided to leave his uniform behind to return to Keralam and take care of his terminally ill mother. Following this break, he had fallen short of the 15-year service threshold that was needed to qualify for a pension.

“After my mother's death, my family was scattered, and I had no reason to stay. I came to Delhi and spent the next four decades surviving on whatever work I could find while I was young. The situation got worse after the building accident in 2017,” he told The Better India.

Peethambaran had even made three attempts to end his life owing to loneliness, depression and financial instability.

Gaurav Shukla, 26 at the time, saw that photograph and decided to go find him.

A soldier's son who never got to serve

Gaurav grew up in a household shaped by military life. His father wore the army's uniform for 28 years and served during the 1999 Kargil War. Gaurav tried multiple times to join the armed forces himself and did not make it. The loss stayed with him.

Gaurav attempted the armed forces selection process more than once and never made it through, a loss that stayed with him long after.

“The uniform, to me, represented something not just duty, but a kind of pride I had grown up watching from close range and had never quite been able to claim,” says Gaurav.

He built a different career instead, completing a master's in TV production, broadcast, and journalism, then moving to Mumbai, working in film casting, eventually handling auditions for television serials. He was good at it. He also had, somewhere in the background, a different kind of restlessness.

The Jantar Mantar turning point

In 2015, he visited Jantar Mantar during the One Rank One Pension movement and found what he later described as a "mini Bharat" — veterans from Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, the Northeast, gathered in a protest that national television was handling with selective accuracy.

In 2015, a visit to Jantar Mantar during the One Rank One Pension protests showed Gaurav a gap between what the news reported and what veterans were actually living through.

His father watched the news at home and was told that pension arrears had been distributed. The men at the protest site described a different reality. The gap between what was being reported and what was actually true became, for Gaurav, a threshold he could not step back from.

First cases, first name

He made a video about three soldiers from a Haryana village who had collectively fought in the wars of 1962, 1965, and 1971. A colonel's wife shared it on social media. Upon seeing the video, a Businessman from Jaipur reached out and offered to give Rs 5,000 to Sepoy Banarasi (one of the 3 soldiers whose story was shot) as a token of appreciation and gratitude.

“Alongside that, I also came to know of and reached my first real case — a martyr's family in Faizabad — when I cold-called the Sarpanchs of several villages in North India, trying to find out if there were families of any ex-soldiers living in distress who needed support,” Gaurav says.

A video about three soldiers who had fought in the wars of 1962, 1965, and 1971 led to Gaurav's first donation case and, soon after, the founding of Support Our Heroes.

For the Faizabad soldier's family, the team was able to travel to Faizabad to meet them, and persuaded the school to waive the tuition fee for the children through the twelfth grade.

“Soon, one family led to another and the cycle began,” he recalls.

He named the organisation Support Our Heroes (SOH), which was established around February 2017. Its stated purpose was simple: to connect a need with someone who has the resources to meet it.

The Ex-soldier sleeping at Connaught Place

In 2019, when Gaurav came across the photograph of Peethambaran, he spent close to a week trying to locate him. He printed an A3-sized copy of the image and walked the Connaught Place area systematically, showing it to shopkeepers, guards, and vendors. A security guard outside a jewellery store eventually pointed him in the right direction.

Garav recalls that when he visited his home, what he found was a structure made of sheets, plastic, and rope — the kind that people in long-term homelessness build out of whatever the city discards. Peethambaran was around 75 at the time and his hearing had deteriorated.

Decades earlier, Peethambaran served as a Signalman in the Signal Corps during the 1965 and 1971 wars, before leaving service to nurse his dying mother — a decision that cost him his pension.

The metal rod that had been inserted in his hip joint during a surgery because of which he was using crutches to walk with support. He was drinking, and he told Gaurav plainly that it was not out of happiness. He had tried to die three times. The rope had broken each time.

“I sat with him for an hour. Forty minutes of that conversation were spent with Peethambaran weeping without pause. My heart ached to watch him like that but I had to do my duty and comfort him. What he needed most then was support and a shoulder to simply cry on,” Gaurav says.

Building consistency, one payment at a time

The first thing Gaurav addressed was health. The second was consistency. Support Our Heroes began covering rations and medicines through a vendor payment model that has since become the organisation's standard practice: rather than putting cash in a beneficiary's hands, SOH pays the local grocery store and the pharmacy directly via QR transfer each month.

“Peethambaran walks in, collects what he needs, and the bill goes back to the organisation. There is no handling of money, no risk of the funds being spent elsewhere, and for an 82-year-old with intermittent cognitive clarity, no anxiety about managing a transaction,” Gaurav emphasises.

Once support began, SOH started paying local shops and pharmacies directly each month, so Peethambaran never had to handle cash himself.

He stopped drinking entirely — a transformation Gaurav mentions with particular care, knowing where Peethambaran was when they first met. “He now reads the philosophical writings of Swami Vivekananda to fill the hours, takes whatever walk his body allows in the mornings, and makes himself tea,” Gaurav mentions.

A life steadied

On his wall, Peethambaran keeps a piece of paper with Gaurav's phone number written on it. He explained the reasoning himself: "Kal agar main mar jaata hoon, toh koi bataane waala nahin hai. Koi soonghta hua aayega, phone number dekhega, call kar dega. (If I die tomorrow, there is no one to inform. At least if someone passing by sees the number, they will make the call).”

He carries a matching card in his pocket, tucked alongside his ex-serviceman identity document.

SOH has placed him in old age homes three times. Each time, he has come back within days. A man who has lived outdoors for four decades, Gaurav observed, cannot simply be settled into a closed room. Peethambaran put his own reasoning plainly: if he lives alone, at least his troubles are his own. Seeing others suffer would only add to his suffering. In this, there is something that resembles a clear-eyed dignity.

The ex-serviceman's Penury Grant case has been filed with the appropriate office but remains in the queue. SOH continues bridging the gap — somewhere between four and seven thousand rupees a month, depending on what arises — while following up on the pending paperwork.

The widow who carried stones

In the hills of Garhwal in Uttarakhand, Roshni Pande had been living a different kind of quiet endurance.

In Uttarakhand, Roshni Pande was left to raise her daughter alone after her husband was discharged short of his pension and later passed away — she turned to manual labour under MGNREGA, earning as little as Rs 150–200 a fortnight.

Her husband, Sapper Digresh Kumar Pande, served in the Indian Army for 13.5 years before a mental illness due to which he was known to be aggressive and often clashed with his officers, which led to multiple warnings and, eventually, his discharge from service on disciplinary grounds.

Being relieved from service without pension — especially when he was so close to completing the 15 years required for pensionable service — further worsened his mental health. He fell ill and eventually passed away.

He died before reaching the 15-year threshold that would have entitled his family to a pension. Roshni was 42 when it happened. Their daughter was around 14 years of age.

Years of manual labour

“To keep the household going, I enrolled under MGNREGA — the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme, which offers manual labour work on rural public infrastructure projects. For me, this meant road construction: carrying and laying stones by hand for six hours a day, waiting several months for payment to arrive in my bank account,” recalls Roshni, with a tinge of sorrow in her tone.

The rate was between Rs 150 and Rs 200 for a fortnight of work, and the scheme was available for only two to three months of the year. “The remaining nine months I managed through vegetable farming and group work in the village. A separate NGO engaged with my case for six months but unfortunately was not able to produce anything,” she says.

“Her case was then proposed to me by an Ex-Sergeant from Uttarakhand, asking if he could get something done for her. SOH hadn't been formed yet, and I was still an individual who used to visit Jantar Mantar regularly, and therefore, was in touch with Ex-Defence officers there,” Gaurav says.

After being approached to help Roshni Pandey, he connected her with an Ex-Servicemen Welfare organisation run by some ex-officers. She engaged with the organisation for about six months and followed up multiple times, but nothing came of it — she was simply asked to wait each time she reached out.

A shop, then a business

The endless waiting prompted Gaurav to step in and help her in his individual capacity. He asked her what she would like to do for a living, so she could start leading a dignified life.

“I told him that I wanted to run a shop selling puja items — the ritual goods that are consistent household spending across Garhwal. I estimated needing fifty to sixty thousand rupees to stock it. SOH gave me sixty thousand,” Roshni says, but this time, feeling gratitude and a sense of pride in her work.

The shop worked. Monthly earnings settled between eight and ten thousand rupees. But Roshni did not stop there. She added mushroom farming. Then, papad is manufactured using a machine and a dryer to produce lentil crackers. Then pickles. Then, additional grinding equipment.

A one-time grant of Rs 60,000 helped Roshni open a small shop, which she eventually grew into a multi-venture business employing other widows in her village.

She now employs two other women from similarly difficult circumstances — widows — and pays each of them Rs 3,000 to Rs 4,000 a month.

Recognition and a message to others

The recognition arrived in stages. Along with Gaurav, All India Radio invited her to share her story on air. She was felicitated at Garhwal Bhavan in Delhi for women's empowerment. The district magistrate's office in Pauri acknowledged her work.

When the radio programme aired, her phone rang for days. Neighbours, acquaintances, people from her village block, all calling to say they had heard her. "Roshni, tu toh star ban gayi re (Roshini you have become a star!)," she says, with a laugh.

Her message to other defence families left without support is consistent: sitting still, she says, only brings more darkness. You have to move forward on your own courage, because that part, no one else can do for you.

The gap between service and support

The two stories are connected by something more precise than misf ortune. Both Peethambaran and Roshni's husband fell short of the 15-year continuous service threshold that determines pension eligibility.

SOH was built on a specific principle: it does not duplicate what the government already provides — it exists only in the space the state doesn't reach.

Both were consequently excluded from ECHS — the Ex-Servicemen Contributory Health Scheme — which provides medical coverage to veterans. Both existed, for all formal purposes, outside the welfare structure built for those who serve.

India retires approximately 50,000 soldiers every year. A significant proportion fall below this threshold and leave the forces without a pension, without medical coverage, and often without proximity to welfare offices or the documentation support needed to navigate what little bureaucratic provision exists.

“Support Our Heroes was built specifically for this population. We are deliberate on the point: the organisation does not replicate what the state provides. It fills the spaces the state does not reach,” Gaurav explains with care.

Over the past ten years — Gaurav started this work at 26 and is now 36 — SOH has supported more than 350 soldiers and their families, with over 140 beneficiaries receiving lifetime monthly support across 22 states through its various projects.

Six projects, one mission

Six focused projects form the operational structure that makes this possible:

• Project PITHU delivers monthly ration kits to non-pensioner veterans and their widows above 65.

• Project SEHAT covers ongoing medications for non-pensioner veterans and their widows above 60 years of age a month for those excluded from ECHS.

• Project SAKSHAM pays school fees through the twelfth grade for children of deceased or disabled veterans.

• Project SASHAKT funds small business for Disabled soldiers (post-retirement), widows/veer nari, non-pensioner needy Ex-soldiers & widows, and dependents. starts, from Rs 8,000 for a sewing machine to Rs 1 lakh for a grocery shop, with ventures running in Manipur, Chhattisgarh, and Assam.

• A memorial scholarship in the name of Wing Commander Vinod — a Two times Vir Chakra Awardee from 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pak wars, who was part of SOH's core team before his death — supports medically boarded-out cadets & PBORs from Training Academies.

• Project INSANIYAT covers everything that falls outside the others: emergency cancer treatment bills, disaster relief operations across Poonch, Punjab, Manipur, and Uttarakhand.

The six projects aren't separate causes, they're one life's needs, broken into pieces small enough to fund.

The organisation has received recognition from 12 Governors, five Chief Ministers, various departments of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and recently from the Hon’ble President of India.

'A soldier without a uniform'

Although Gaurav Shukla could not become a soldier in the army, he proudly describes himself as “a soldier without a uniform”. The uniform represented pride, he says. He never got to wear it but this is his way of contributing to the people of the force.

And on a more conscious note, the funding model is deliberately distributed: some serving officers contribute on a monthly, quarterly, or annual cycle; retired military personnel give what they can; civilian supporters and defence families participate; and small self-help groups pool together for specific cases.

Each case is cross-verified through a network of serving officer course-mates posted across regions, alongside district sainik boards and village-level Ex-servicemen committees. When a case is resolved, documentation and footage of the outcome go back to everyone who contributed,” Gaurav explains.

A guiding principle

The principle guiding the organisation is: If someone in need comes to you and you cannot help them, never simply say sorry and send them away. Tell them where else to go.

This was the guiding principle from Gen KM Cariappa (The First Indian Army Commander-in-Chief, Later Field Marshal).

Fifty thousand soldiers retire every year, and a fraction of them vanish from the system entirely — SOH's real achievement is refusing to let that be someone else's problem.

“SOH has also designed its projects in such a way that if a soldier family in need comes to us, we are able to help them in the best possible manner,” says Gaurav.

It is the simplest possible formulation of what humane welfare looks like. And it is the opposite of what Peethambaran encountered for four decades before someone came with a printed photograph and a willingness to walk the streets of Connaught Place asking strangers if they had seen this man.

“I am 82 now, or somewhere around that. I live alone, by choice. I read in the mornings, walk when my body cooperates, and keep the number on my wall,” Peethambaran says, happy to just have someone to talk to for a brief period over a phone call.

In Garhwal, Roshni Pande rises early, runs her machines, checks on the women she employs, and manages a cluster of small businesses that did not exist seven years ago.

Both of them, in different ways, are proof of what becomes possible when someone decides that the gap in the welfare net is not a fixed feature of the world.

All images courtesy of Support Our Heroes (SOH)

You can reach Support Our Heroes (SOH) on Instagram at @supportourheroes_official.

To support their work, get in touch via email at fundraise.soh@gmail.com.

If you need support, you can call them at +91-9891562760, Monday to Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm.

Source: The Better India