Former Street Child Saves 800+ Lives During COVID in Chennai

Seetha Devi knows what it feels like to be invisible. She grew up on Chennai's streets, just another child the world looked past.

But instead of letting that define her, she spent decades pulling others out of the same darkness. Over 5,000 street children have stayed in school because of her work. Abandoned elders found shelter in Chennai's slums because she refused to let them fade away alone.

Then COVID arrived, and the pandemic turned India's hospitals into impossible fortresses. Seetha's mother died outside a government hospital, unable to get the oxygen she desperately needed. That loss could have broken her.

Instead, it ignited something fiercer. Seetha transformed an auto rickshaw into a mobile oxygen vehicle, racing through Chennai's streets as the virus choked the city. She delivered oxygen cylinders to homes where families watched their loved ones struggle to breathe.

For months, she drove through empty streets while others sheltered inside. Every trip meant risking her own life, but she made the choice 800 times over. Each patient she reached on time was someone else's mother, father, child who got to keep breathing.

Why This Inspires

Seetha doesn't call what she does charity. "It's responsibility," she says, and those two words contain everything about why her work matters.

She didn't wait for someone else to fix the oxygen crisis. She didn't let grief paralyze her after losing her mother. She just converted an auto rickshaw and started saving lives, the same way she's been saving lives for decades.

Her story proves that the people who understand suffering best are often the ones who fight hardest to end it. Growing up on the streets taught Seetha that nobody's coming to save you. So she became the person who shows up.

The oxygen vehicle isn't running anymore, but Seetha's work continues. Street children still find their way to school because of her. Elders still have roofs over their heads. And 800 families still have someone they love because one woman refused to let tragedy have the final word.