None of the hundreds of thousands of people who benefited from Pushpa Anand’s charitable work knew her name. Nor, indeed, did many of her disciples. She was known simply as Ma, whose dedication to the poor, especially women, inspired followers from around the world. (She dropped her own name after achieving a state of spiritual flow she called urvashi.)

From the age of 34 she dedicated herself to several years of intense religious study and spiritual practice, and thereafter became known as Param Pujya (Her Holiness). But she always preferred Ma.

Her work stretched from the rural squalor of the northern state of Himachal Pradesh to poor villages in Haryana and the slums of Delhi. She was the spiritual leader of about 80 people of various faiths and nationalities, all of whom live a disciplined life in service to others. Although steeped in Hindu and Jain philosophy, she encouraged her followers to pursue any path they wished in search of God.

In 1962 after years of sadhana (intense meditation), contemplation and introspection, she established, in one small room, the Arpana Ashram in the Haryana village of Madhuban Karnal. It is now a sprawling centre with a 150-bed hospital, including a large outpatients’ department, specialising in maternal care and child welfare. The ophthalmology department performs about 8,000 eye operations a year for little or no charge. Its doctors and surgeons serve about 300,000 people in Karnal and surrounding villages.

Pushpa Anand focused much of her work on women’s empowerment. She formed women’s groups in every village around Karnal, aimed at forging closer co-operation among women and teaching them how to handle money. The ashram gives micro-loans to women for small projects and teaches them how to manage money.

The Prince of Wales is patron of the Arpana Charitable Trust UK, an important source of funds for her organisation. He once visited Karnal and caused a stir when he failed to wear an elaborately decorated turban given to him by the village headman.

He asked Pushpa Anand what was the secret of her achievements, to which she replied: “Say little, do much.” The WHO gave the charity the Sasakawa award for its work.

The focus of Arpana Ashram’s work is to involve villagers in improving their lives by their own efforts, and to encourage them to accept social change — often meaning that men must change their attitudes towards women. Her work among women around Karnal in the past two decades has created a significant fall in the birthrate, which is now comparable to Western Europe’s.

Whatever the project, the influence of Ma was always there, even in recent years when she was weakened by diabetes and more recently by several strokes. “If you want to be truly happy,” she said, “relinquish all expectations and rights over the other. Lay yourself at the service of all.”

In Delhi she urged her followers to regard slum children as their own and “love them with the throbbing heart of a mother”. A donation from Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia enabled her to resettle 30,000 people in one large slum into a model residential enclave, and to offer hundreds of young people the opportunity to learn a trade.

One of her greatest achievements was to produce, in 1962, a number of granthas, long scriptural texts, amounting to 8,000 pages of analysis of the Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads. These have been critically acclaimed.

Pushpa Anand was one of nine children born into an affluent family of Punjabi Khatri Hindus. Her father was the first Indian principal of the Law College, Lahore. She graduated from the city’s Kinnard College, where she excelled at sports and led women’s sports teams to six national championships. She later became secretary of the All India Hockey Federation. After Partition in 1947 she was elected to the Punjab Legislative Assembly but, complaining that politics lacked vision and honesty, gave it up to pursue a spiritual life.

Pushpa Anand, Indian guru and social worker, was born on August 26, 1924. She died on April 16, 2008, aged 83