Navi Mumbai: Early this month, a one-year-old owl lay gasping for breath in Turbhe village in Navi Mumbai, flitting between life and death. A group of crows had mercilessly attacked it, hoping to make a meal of the little bird. A passer-by who was watching with horror, called the Bhumi Jeevdaya Samvardhan Trust, which works with animals in distress. In no time, its volunteers reached there from their medical centre in the vicinity and rescued the bird.
The bird, which couldn’t open its eyes when it was brought in to the trust’s medical centre, partially opened one eye on the fourth day.
In another incident at Vashi this month, a stray cat was crying in pain when a biker ran over it, causing it severe pain. The cat, which couldn’t walk or open its mouth due to a dismantled jaw, is able to move slowly after five days of treatment at Bhumi Jeevdaya. And for over a month, Pawna’s villagers were terrified after some of them saw a 4-feet-long cobra in the thicket adjoining the village. Bhumi Jeevdaya’s volunteers, along with their in-house snake catcher Yogesh Bansode, chased the cobra for nearly a month, and finally caught it last week. The snake will be released to the jungles near Shilphata on the road to Kalyan.
A trust that runs only on donations, Bhumi Jeevdaya has treated 9,500 stray animals, birds and even reptiles. Started in July 2014 by Raghavji Patel and Kamlesh Patel, the organisation aims at providing quality treatment to injured strays, and give them a new lease of life. “We work from Monday to Saturday and attend to calls from Airoli to Panvel and even Uran,” said Sagar Savla, Managing Trustee of the organisation. The trust has one in-house doctor and two rescuers who take calls and rescue strays in distress. They visit the injured animals on site, treat them and then release them, and if needed, bring them to the trust’s medical centre at Turbhe and keep the animals with them till they recover completely. The animals are released at the same place from where they were found. The trust has an ambulance and a two-wheeler to carry the animals, Mr. Savla said.
The organisation has a tie-up with a shelter for cows at Panvel and Belapur too, so whenever they find an injured cow or buffalo, they treat the animal and leave it at the shelter where it lives for their rest of its life.
Bhumi Jeevdaya Samvardhan Trust came into existence when animal lover Savla shared his dream of having a medical centre for strays withhis mentor Raghavji Patel, who is the Founder-President of the trust. “My mentor and guru helped me fulfil this dream through this trust,”said Mr. Savla. Up until then, Navi Mumbai hadjust one NGO in Turbhe -- In Defense of Animals -- which has a tie-up with the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation, but they only treat dogs and cats. After Bhumi Jeevdaya came into existence, birds, reptiles and large animals have also started getting treatment.
Navi Mumbai has two cow shelters in Belapur and Panvel which has tied up with the trust and takes care of the treated cows. In December 2016, a cow had slipped from a mountain in New Panvel and damaged its leg. It was taken to Bhumi Jeevdaya’s medical centre and treated, and later sent to the cow shelter. “Between Panvel and Kharghar, we get many calls of injured large animals that include donkeys, horses, cows and buffaloes. At times we get calls from Mumbai toofor large animals who are victims of road accidents. We do attend them as well,” Mr Savla said.
The trust has recently shifted to a relatively larger, rented set-up in Turbhe, from its small shelter in Vashi. It now aims to have an in-house operation theatre exclusively for strays.“We need equipment and a full-time surgeon and we aim to have those very soon,” said Mr. Savla. Financial constraints are preventing them from going ahead with the plan, he said.
In its Turbhe home, the trust can accommodate 50 dogs and cats along with 2,000 birds.“Whenever surgery is needed, we take them to surgeons with whom we have tie-ups, in Chembur and Belapur and to another NGO in South Mumbai where surgeries are handled. With the in-house operation theatre that we plan to start, we won’t have to depend on an external surgeon,”Mr Savla said. for now, the trust is running the show with two rescuers, a doctir and a driver. It is open to having more volunteers on board, he said.
The organisation’s next step is to start a full-fledged hospital for animals, andthey are in preliminary talks with CIDCO for granting them a small plot of land.
The trust's helpline numbers are 8424004484/8424004485
