6 Cricketers batting for a cause
Cricketing legend Steve Waugh once said, “If you don’t help people who are in need, it’s just not cricket.” We have seen many cricketers follow this religiously, devoting a part of their cricket earned income to charity. From funding medical research to providing roof to the homeless, our favourite cricketers have been winning hearts off the field as well.
Here are 5 such cricketers who have actively participated in charity works time and again.
#1 Sachin Tendulkar
The God of Cricket prefers keeping his off-field life behind the curtains. But some of his charity-driven work has been established in public domain by media. Sachin Tendulkar has been a huge supporter of Apnalaya, an NGO that is apparently close to his mother-in-law, the president of the NGO, who has dedicated nearly four decades of her life to it.
Through the medium of Apnalaya, the little master sponsors around 200 disadvantaged children every year.
In the year 2011, Tendulkar raised a corpus fund of Rs. 1.20 crores to help more than 300 kids in their treatment of cancer. In 2013, again, he came to limelight for his charity work when along with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, he aided the Coca-Cola-NDTV ‘Support My School’ campaign to collect Rs. 13 crores towards the resurrection of 272 Indian schools.
More recently, the cricketer turned MP’s philanthropic side was seen again when he adopted a drought-affected village under a parliament scheme called the Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana programme. Each Member of Parliament under this programme needs to choose one village from their constituency and develop it as a model village.
Tendulkar selected Donja village in Maharashtra's Osmanabad district.