Bhagat Puran Singh was born at Rajewal in Ludhiana district in 1904, brought up Hindu, and became a Sikh as a young man while living at Gurdwara Dera Sahib in Lahore.
In 1934 a severely disabled boy of about four was left at the gurdwara. Nobody would take him. He carried the boy, Piara Singh, on his back for the next fourteen years, through Lahore and then across the border in 1947, and looked after him until the boy died.
Out of that he built Pingalwara at Amritsar, a home for the destitute, the disabled and the abandoned, funded by collection, which takes anyone and asks nothing. It houses hundreds of people.
He was also, from the 1960s, one of India's earliest environmental campaigners, printing pamphlets on deforestation, soil erosion, pollution and population on scrap paper and handing them out himself. He wrote about the ecological cost of the Green Revolution while it was still being celebrated.
He returned the Padma Shri in 1984. He died in 1992. Pingalwara continues.
He carried a man on his back for fourteen years. Everything else follows from that.
He carried a disabled boy called Piara on his back for years and built the institution around him, and Pingalwara at Amritsar cares for several hundred people with nobody else.
He wrote and printed pamphlets on soil, trees, water and population from the 1940s, decades before anybody in Punjab was talking about the environment, and distributed them free.
He returned his Padma Shri in 1984. He was one of the first people to say publicly that the Green Revolution would cost the state its water.