Kashmir , August 16,2026-KP Volunteers Foundation Day was celebrated in Jammu as LG Manoj Sinha recognised the organisation’s humanitarian work and community service.The Lieutenant Governor joined members of the Jammu-based voluntary organisation as it marked its Foundation Day, spotlighting the group’s humanitarian work among the displaced Kashmiri Pandit community and beyond.
Jammu, August 16: Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha attended the Foundation Day celebration of KP Volunteers in Jammu on Sunday, lending official recognition to a grassroots organisation that has, over the past several years, built a reputation for rapid, no-frills humanitarian response across the Union Territory.
The Lieutenant Governor’s presence at the event underscored the growing profile of KP Volunteers, a non-funded voluntary group that began as an informal response to the COVID-19 pandemic and has since grown into an internationally networked team of several hundred volunteers.
From Pandemic Response to Permanent Institution
KP Volunteers was founded by Vikram Koul and has been coordinated over the years by Roshan Pandita and several others, growing from its origins during the onset of the pandemic into a team of more than 300 volunteers spread across the globe. What began as an emergency response network has evolved into a permanent fixture of Jammu’s civil society landscape — one built around speed, informality and direct action rather than bureaucratic process.
The organisation operates on a simple premise: distress calls for socio-medical assistance are received through digitally connected platforms, verified, and acted upon swiftly. Its volunteers have focused on a wide spread of needs — financial assistance to the poor, educational support for deserving students, medical attention for patients, blood donation drives, food relief, and rehabilitation support for families in crisis. In recent years, the group has placed particular emphasis on arranging urgent blood donations for critical and accident cases, a service that has made it a recognisable name in Jammu’s emergency-response ecosystem.
A Voice for the Displaced Community
While KP Volunteers’ work extends to the wider public, its founding and continued presence are closely tied to Jammu’s large population of displaced Kashmiri Pandits — a community that has, since the exodus of the early 1990s, built an extensive network of associations, welfare bodies and advocacy groups in the city. Organisations under this broader banner have long pressed the administration on issues ranging from rehabilitation and employment packages to security and honour for the community, both those settled in Jammu and those who worked in the Valley under government employment schemes.
Against that backdrop, the Lieutenant Governor’s attendance at the KP Volunteers Foundation Day carries symbolic weight. Sinha has, on multiple occasions over his tenure, engaged directly with representatives of displaced Kashmiri Pandit organisations at Raj Bhavan Jammu, and has consistently used such platforms to acknowledge the community’s welfare concerns and its contributions to civil society. His appearance at Sunday’s celebration continues that pattern of engagement, this time recognising a volunteer-driven organisation built almost entirely on grassroots initiative rather than government or institutional funding.
Recognition for Grassroots Service
Events such as Sunday’s Foundation Day celebration have increasingly become occasions where the UT administration formally acknowledges the work of citizen-led welfare groups — a category of organisation that has taken on greater importance in a region regularly affected by natural calamities, medical emergencies and the long tail of displacement-related hardship. For a body like KP Volunteers, built on unpaid service and word-of-mouth mobilisation, official recognition from the Lieutenant Governor offers both validation and, potentially, greater visibility for its continuing appeals for blood donors, educational sponsors and emergency relief contributors.
As KP Volunteers marks another year since its pandemic-era founding, Sunday’s celebration in Jammu served as a reminder of how informal, community-driven responses to crisis can, over time, harden into lasting institutions — ones now visible enough to draw the Lieutenant Governor himself to their milestone events.
