NEW DELHI, Feb 9: Indian social activist Murlidhar Devidas Amte, who created a rural commune that provided a home and jobs to the country’s widely shunned leprosy sufferers, died on Saturday aged 93, family said.

Amte, known popularly as Baba (father) Amte died at his home in the Anandwan commune in India’s western Maharashtra state after a long illness.

“His work spans almost 70 years,” his older son Vikas Amte, a doctor at the commune, said on Saturday, describing Anandwan (Forest of Joy) as “a sanctuary for someone who has no home a sanctuary of love”. Inspired by independence icon Mahatma Gandhi, Amte began his work among India’s “untouchables” those at the bottom of India’s caste hierarchy treated as pariahs by other Hindus for their work clearing human waste.

But after seeing a leprosy patient lying abandoned in a sewer, Amte, a lawyer by profession, turned his attention to helping lepers cast out by their families fearing the curable but disfiguring disease might spread.

In 1951, Amte, born into a prosperous high-caste Brahmin family.—AFP