The Edhi ambulance service holds a title no other charity on earth can claim: Guinness World Records lists it as the largest volunteer ambulance organisation in the world. Abdul Sattar Edhi began the service in Karachi in 1948, and more than three quarters of a century later, the white ambulances with EDHI written in red still answer emergency calls in cities, towns and villages across Pakistan. It is the fifth entry in our Amazing Facts About Pakistan series, and it is still true today.
A Dispensary in Mithadar, Where It Began
Abdul Sattar Edhi was born in 1928 in Bantva, Gujarat, and migrated with his family to Karachi in 1947, arriving on 4 September that year. Two experiences shaped everything that followed: his mother was paralysed and mentally ill, and there was almost no one to help families like his. In 1948 he began working at the Bantva Memon Dispensary in Mithadar, Karachi, and started the ambulance service that same year, personally ferrying injured people to hospital. In 1951 he opened his first Edhi clinic and dispensary in the city. From that single vehicle and one small room grew the Edhi Foundation, and with it a welfare network run almost entirely on donations and volunteers.
Edhi’s own life became the foundation’s best advertisement. He collected donations by asking ordinary people directly, lived in a small room at the foundation’s Karachi headquarters, and drew only a modest living from the work. He also declined government funding offered with conditions attached, preferring donations from the public, so the service would answer to the public alone. Pakistanis responded for decades, giving generously at home and from abroad, and the man the newspapers called “the richest poor man” became one of the most trusted names in the country.
What Guinness Says About the Edhi Ambulance Service
The Guinness World Records entry, under the title “Largest volunteer ambulance organisation”, reads: “Abdul Sattar Edhi (Pakistan) began his ambulance service in 1948, ferrying injured people to hospital. Today, his radio linked ambulance fleet operates all over Pakistan.” The same Guinness page records the wider network the service anchors: hundreds of relief centres, three air ambulances, dozens of hospitals and free dispensaries, drug rehabilitation centres, women’s centres, adoption programmes, and soup kitchens feeding 100,000 people a month, along with training for thousands of nurses. Reports over the years have put the fleet of the Edhi ambulance service at very different sizes, which is why this article sticks to the record itself: the Guinness title, which has never been in dispute, and the founding year of 1948, which every source agrees on. The listing is also one of the few humanitarian world records Pakistan holds, and an unusual one, because it honours an organisation that is still working, rather than a single feat from the past.
Photo: Hussain, via Wikimedia Commons
Still True Today: The Service After Edhi
Abdul Sattar Edhi died on 8 July 2016, was laid to rest with full state honours and was buried at Edhi Village in Karachi, in a grave he had prepared for himself years earlier, but the service he built did not stop with him. It continues today under the Edhi Foundation, led by his son Faisal Edhi, running around the clock: ambulances on the road day and night, air and marine ambulance services, Edhi Homes and orphanages, cradles (jhoolas) where abandoned babies can be left safely, morgues, women’s shelters and rehabilitation centres. The News, in its obituary, tallied what the foundation had done by 2016 alone: at least 20,000 abandoned children rescued, some 50,000 orphans sheltered, and thousands of people housed in its shelters. Like the K2 fact and the Indus Basin irrigation fact earlier in this series, this is a record Pakistan does not have to look back on with nostalgia. For millions of Pakistanis, the Edhi ambulance is still the first vehicle they hope to see in an emergency, and it still comes.
Sources
- Guinness World Records: Largest Volunteer Ambulance Organisation
- Edhi Foundation: Official Website
- The News: Edhi Laid to Rest With Full State Honours, July 2016
- Featured image: An Edhi ambulance on the road in Karachi. Photo: Asif Hassan, via Wikimedia Commons
- In-body image: Abdul Sattar Edhi. Photo: Hussain, via Wikimedia Commons
Umar is an engineer by profession and a passionate writer by passion. He has a deep interest in sharing good news related to Pakistan and has been working hard to promote the positive image of his homeland. Umar has written numerous articles on various topics related to Pakistan, such as technology, sports, culture, and economy.