In photo above the person sitting among so many happy brides is Mahesh Savani, a famous and kind hearted mid-aged businessman from Surat, does not look like a father of over 470 married daughters and its still counting.

Few years ago, Savani’s brother passed away. When his nieces were getting married, and it was Savani who not just helped financially but also stepped up to play the role of their father and perform their ‘kanyadaan.’

The incident made him think about the countless girls who had lost their fathers and did not have a father figure to look up to.

“”It is challenging for a woman who has lost her husband to get her daughter married,”

“I am proud to be the father of these girls. My brother Rajubhai and I had decided to organise a mass wedding ceremony for girls who had lost their fathers.”

Savani gifts his adopted daughters gold and silver jewellery, as well as clothes, electronic goods and other utensils needed to set up a home.

Savani spends over Rs. 4 lakh on each wedding.

His relationship with his adopted daughters doesn’t end with just the wedding: “Mahesh papa is just a message away when we need him,” says Hina Kathiriya, one of Savani’s adopted daughters.

One of such lucky married daughter, Naheda Banu, who lost her own father when she was a child, says that ‘Mahesh papa’ has been more than a dad to me.

Savani has been lauded for arranging mass weddings and acting as a father figure, even performing the kanyadaan (a ceremony in which the father of the bride hands his daughter over to the groom) of several underprivileged girls in Gujarat.

Every Father’s Day, Savani gets hundreds of greeting cards, letters and messages from his ‘daughters’ from all over country.

Savani has been supporting girls from modest backgrounds to get married since over a decade.

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