As the year draws to a close, it is not milestones or headlines that stay with us, but moments of care that arrived when someone needed them. A jacket offered before winter tightened its grip. A warm meal placed into tired hands. A life cared for long after it was abandoned.

These moments sit at the heart of ‘Force for Good Heroes’, an initiative by the Aditya Birla Group started last year to spotlight individuals whose everyday actions are shaping lives and communities for the better. It is a way of recognising people who respond to what they see around them, choosing care, responsibility, and presence in their own ways.

Across cities and circumstances, such individuals showed up again and again. With warmth offered under bridges, meals served outside hospital gates, and lifelong care extended where it was most needed, their actions created real change.

This piece looks back at three such ‘Force for Good’ Heroes, and at what their choices have already set in motion. As we turn the page on the year, their stories remind us that care continues, reaching further and touching more lives with each passing day.

By morning, Bapon Das is in uniform, moving through Kolkata’s traffic, responding to calls and clocking long hours as an assistant sub-inspector with Kolkata police’s ‘Special Branch’. By evening, he is back on his motorcycle, sacks of donated clothes tied behind him, riding across the city for a different kind of duty. For Bapon, service does not end when a shift does.

Over the years, policing brought him face-to-face with the same scenes repeatedly. People sleeping at railway stations and bus stands, wrapped in torn clothes, with thin layers standing between their bodies and the cold. These were not sights he passed by once. They stayed with him.

Having lost his cousin due to a lack of donated blood, Bapon carried a lasting awareness of how absence of timely help can change........

© The Better India