Our Story

It started small, and without much of a plan. In 1995, a group of volunteers in Almora began doing basic health awareness work in their own villages, nothing more formal than talks and screenings. In 2009, a hospital in Delhi started sending its doctors back up into these hills, specifically to reach heart patients who had no real way of travelling down to the city for treatment. That back and forth went on quietly for years before it had a name.

In 2013, it finally did. Uttarayana Foundation was registered as a society, with Dr O P Yadav, a cardiac surgeon who kept returning to the region he grew up in, as its founder. The pace picked up from there. In 2016, an agreement with the Uttarakhand government gave Kumaon its first dedicated heart care unit, based at Almora district hospital. A year later, in 2017, Uttarayana Hospital opened its own doors in Papersali, inaugurated by the state's Chief Minister at the time.

None of it happened overnight, and it is worth saying so plainly. The foundation had already been working alongside the All India Heart Foundation for close to two decades by the time it was formally registered in 2013, which is longer than that one date would suggest on its own. What looks, from the outside, like a foundation that grew quickly is really the record of a smaller group of people who simply kept showing up, year after year, long before anyone was documenting it.