Providing Emergency Access to Healthcare in India: An Interview with CEO Gayatri Mathur

About the Soondra Foundation

Gayatri Mathur is a physical therapist with over 30 years of experience across India, the United States, and Australia. She founded the Soondra Foundation, a Chicago-based non-profit, after witnessing a domestic worker unable to afford immediate medical care when her child suffered a skull fracture.

That moment exposed a critical gap: India’s healthcare system requires upfront payment. For the estimated 300–350 million workers earning $3–7 per day — too much to qualify for government assistance, not enough to maintain savings — a medical emergency can be catastrophic.

The Problem

“So, if you don’t have any savings for a rainy day… what are you going to do?”

This is the question Gayatri built the Soondra Foundation to answer. These workers sit in an impossible middle: earning slightly above poverty thresholds that gatekeep government healthcare programs, while living paycheck to paycheck with no financial cushion for emergencies.

The Approach

Rather than building separate infrastructure, the Soondra Foundation partners with local non-profits in India — leveraging their existing expertise, networks, and community trust. This collaborative model keeps overhead low and allows the foundation to respond flexibly to crises across sectors: medical emergencies, education access, women’s shelters.

The Research Partnership

The Soondra Foundation collaborated with GroupSolver on a study alongside an Indian NGO focused on early childhood intervention. The research helped identify program gaps and opportunities for more customized, segmented approaches to serving different community needs.

For Gayatri, the value of research isn’t in achieving “gold standard” randomized control trials — which remain inaccessible to small nonprofits. It’s in getting contextual, actionable data that helps local organizations understand their communities and respond more effectively.

How to Help

The Soondra Foundation welcomes support through donations, volunteering, and storytelling. As Gayatri emphasizes, “small grassroots organizations” can create substantial impact with modest resources — but they need the community to see, share, and support what they’re doing.