Our journey began after Kanak Mani Dixit, journalist, writer and civil rights activist, fell down a cliffside and suffered from a spinal cord injury while trekking around the Annapurna Region in August 2001. Fortunately, he managed to recover completely over the course of the next year. Dixit’s experience exposed him, his friends and his family to the severe lack of facilities for rehabilitating t
he victims of spinal injury. The majority of victims were injured while carrying out livelihood activities, such as cutting grass on cliff sides and fodder from high branches. In late 2001, the friends and family came together to start the Spinal Injury Sangha Nepal, a non-profit organization registered with the Social Welfare Council of Nepal (Regd. The Sangha decided that a rehabilitation facility was most urgent. Our first project Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre (SIRC) was inaugurated by the late Sir Edmund Hillary on 7 April 2002 in a converted children’s hospital at Jorpati, Kathmandu which later moved to new purpose-built facilities in November 2008.
