“One must turn difficulties into opportunities”, remarked Apte Kaka in an interview with HULAHUL Times. Mr. Shrikant M. Apte, commonly known as Apte Kaka is a retired banker, former legal practitioner, and the founder of V4Organs Foundation. He has been working passionately to convert every human death into “New Life” by Noble Organ donation. Apte Kaka shares that he grew up in a highly cultured environment whereby serving people and being empathetic was valued a lot. These values given by his family planted the seeds of philanthropy in his soul.

Despite his desire to work for the society and make a difference, Mr. Shrikant shares that during his professional years he could hardly get any time to wholeheartedly engage in social work making him restless and dissatisfied.  Thus, after retiring from bank and working for some time in court he finally decided to bestow all his attention to the welfare work. “I thought God has given me enough and I’m financially sound so I should work for people’s welfare”, says Mr. Apte.

On being asked about his entry into organ donation program and the establishment of V4Organs Foundation, he recalled his professional days when once he wanted to get himself registered for organ donation but faced a lot of formal issues due to lack of information and guidance from anywhere and anyone. Moreover, during those years he also joined an NGO named Rajhans Pratishthan Trust whose annual report about Organ donation wing intrigued him. So, his active engagement in the NGO’s organ donation wing and the free hand given by the founders to work for this cause along with the welcoming coordination of Zonal Organ Transplant Centre paved the way for his entry into this cause and the establishment of V4Organs Foundation.

Apte Kaka expresses how dejected he would feel when someone died due to shortage of organs and negligence and that’s when he decided to shoulder this responsibility and work on ground to find solutions through careful thinking. Coming from a totally different professional background, he initially invested his time and energy in attending the seminars and meetings that discussed various aspects of organ donation to understand it better. Now he frankly says, “I have acquired sufficient knowledge about organ donation that I can create awareness and resolve people’s query about the same”.

The mission of his organisation lies in creating absolute awareness about Body Organ donation, letting no stones remain unturned. They aim to work with their utmost ability and capacity furthered by various training sessions and presentations taken in various areas including Mahila Mandal, Temples, Gurudwara, Church etc.  V4Organs Foundation sought to train and aware people through various audio-visual presentations on organ donation. One such audio-visual presentation was named as “Wonders of Organ Donation”. In their presentations they try to explain various dimensions of Body Organ donation like, about eye donation, skin donation, hand donation etcetera. Mr. Shrikant shares, “I would get at least two calls from the audience to take presentation in their areas”. V4Organs Foundation and Mr. Apte has taken around 400+ presentations so far in various societies.

Apte Kaka is a true Altruist, despite working tirelessly for the organ donation cause he has absolutely no desire for monetary gains and calls Organ donation as his ‘Life Mission’.

Mr. Shrikant shares a story of a presentation that he gave in a Church on the occasion of Good Friday, standing alongside the father of the church and spread awareness. For him, humanity is the only religion and he guides people about the same. For many years now, he has been working to clear people’s mind and doubts around organ donation. Upon asking about people’s perception towards organ donation, Kaka highlighted that their presentation is curated in such a way that it in itself clears all the doubts and apprehension about it. Further in the conversation he shared a very interesting story from one of his presentations where people were apprehensive about engaging in donation because they feared that their religion doesn’t permit it.

To this, he asked them, “tell me which religion doesn’t permit this and where is it written, and in which religious book”. And he also gave verification from MOHAN Foundation that posted a video on their website of different religious leaders clarifying that organ donation is permitted as a noble cause. Besides, he also underscored importance of fraternity in society. He says that end path of all the religion is humanity and all the people are the descendants of same god that preaches humanity.  Hence God and any religion would never object a humane activity like donation.

He then also shed light on the day-to-day functioning of this foundation talking about the efficiency of their administration which is mostly paperless and functions through mobile phones. Apart from working on donation registration they also work towards training young generation through their online training programs. They aim to train young minds to prepare them to lead this social cause for next 50 years and more. Kaka believes that young people have scientific wisdom and clear understanding and they can create much more awareness when trained properly. Their online training program started during the COVID 19 Lockdown when any sort of movement was restricted. This was the time when Kaka thought sitting idle will not help and there was a need to engage with people considering the pressing need of organs. So that’s when his online training program started whereby, they try to give holistic knowledge to the Students enrolled; through various online presentations and books and study material posted on their free telegram channel that divides the entire curriculum into 8 units imparting knowledge to the students from the very basic to advance level about body organ donation ranging from knowledge about enactment, regulation, types of death, what is body organ donation, about the registration process etc. So that nobody remains clueless and have sufficient information to pass it on further. Mr. Apte himself teaches students trough various video lectures on different themes. Moreover, in order to ensure effectiveness of this training program they have tied up with the National Service Scheme (NSS) of various colleges and universities which gives certain credit to the students on completion of the training along with an e-certificate. Mr. Shrikant also shares that their organisation got sponsorship which he used as incentive scholarship of rupee 1000 for the students enrolled in the training programs. This scholarship gave them the honour when they received the certificate and the scholarship by the principal of their college.  

So far V4Organs has been successful in training around 21,000 students but this for Apte Kaka is not enough. He still feels that limited reach is a challenge and aims to reach as many people as possible and create more awareness.

His training program functions exceptionally well with a well-developed mechanism for testing the Intelligence Quotient and learning capacity through a questionnaire developed by the founder himself. And unlike the conventional testing pattern which allows student to take test only once leaving no scope for correction, these questionnaires provide students with a Re-Submission option allowing them to take the test as many times as they want until they achieve 100% accuracy.

“Few girls submitted the questionnaire 5 to 6 times, until they got 100% accuracy”, mentioned Mr. Apte. This approach highlights his vision of hard work that if someone works hard then they can surely come up with efficient results.

Mr. Shrikant M. Apte has been recognised by the Maharashtra government for the incredible work that he does and upon asking him about his idea of success and social impact, he shared a few stories that are most dear to him. He firstly shed on the legality that goes behind the registration process focusing on the need to have blood relation for organ donation with the exception being for the spouses. Also, there are prolonged interviews taken of the donors and the recipients by the authorisation committee to ensure that the donation is not forced and doesn’t involve any financial transaction between the two. Then after he shared a few heartwarming stories of donor who truly wanted to donate organs for the larger welfare. He shared a story of a 4-class worker in a hospital who signed up to donate his wife’s organs after her death to contribute in this noble cause. Apart from this he also recalled a story of a lady who called him to share a story of her father who was not afraid of dying naturally but was afraid of dying of COVID because he then, would not be able to donate his organs and contribute his share in the welfarism. Witnessing such stories on a daily basis makes Apte Kaka say, “I have seen God, in the form of donors”. He also takes pride in the kind social impact they are able to create when very young students of even 8^th standard talk about organ donation and spread awareness around it.

Lastly, on asking him about a message he would like to give to the young changemakers, he said “you can do it, if you work”, primarily focusing on the need to indulge in hard and on ground work and not on just mere words. The saying “Be the change you want to see in the world” goes really well with the idea held by Apte Kaka who motivates people to first contribute in organ donation if they too demand organ supply for their family members.  He says that not everyone has to be a doctor in order to be a saviour, any commoner can be the one and give a new meaning to somebody’s life, the only need is to have a pure intent and the realisation of one’s responsibility towards the society.