He created a charitable empire out of nothing, masterminding Pakistan's largest welfare organisation. Today Abdul Sattar Edhi is revered by many as a national hero.

Content with just two sets of clothes, he sleeps in a windowless room of white tiles adjoining the office of his charitable foundation. Sparsely equipped: it has just one bed, a sink and a hotplate.

"He never established a home for his own children," says his wife Bilquis, who manages the foundation's homes for women and children.

What he has established is something of a safety net for Pakistan's poor and destitute, mobilising the nation to donate and help take action ─ filling a gap left by the lack of a welfare state.

"Mr Edhi sits here, waiting for your donations," sputters the speaker of an Edhi ambulance parked in an affluent neighbourhood of Karachi, the port megalopolis of glaring inequalities.

Passers-by deposit alms or pay their respects to the frail old man, whose white beard and worn karakul ─ a triangular cap ─ are known throughout the country and beyond.

Edhi has been nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and appears on the list again this year ─ put there by Malala Yousufzai, Pakistan's teenage Nobel laureate.

New nation, new hope

Edhi, born to a family of Muslim traders in Gujarat in British India, arrived in Pakistan after its bloody creation in 1947.

"He thought that this new Muslim nation would be a social welfare state," says his son Faisal. But, when they got to Pakistan, he found "it was the exact opposite".

The state's failure to help his struggling family care for his mother ─ paralysed and suffering from mental health issues ─ was his painful and decisive turning point towards philanthropy.

In the sticky streets in the heart of Karachi, Edhi, full of idealism and hope, opened his first clinic in 1951.

"Social welfare was my vocation, I had to free it," he says in his autobiography, "A Mirror To The Blind".

Motivated by a spiritual quest for justice, over the years Edhi and his team have created maternity wards, morgues, orphanages, shelters, and homes for the elderly ─ all aimed at helping those in society who cannot help themselves.

The most prominent symbols of the foundation ─ its 1,500 ambulances ─ are deployed with unusual efficiency to the scene of terrorist attacks that tear through the country with devastating regularity.

But its ethos of humanitarianism transcending religious and ethnic lines while empowering the people, has made it the target of many ferocious smear campaigns. Hardliners have branded him an infidel and his work un-Islamic.

Edhi's response has been hard work and an obstinate asceticism, a bid to leave his enemies with no ammunition.

His work so conquered the esteem of the public that armed groups and bandits were known to spare his ambulances.

The annual budget of Rs1.5 billion, mainly from donations by middle- and working-class Pakistanis, continues to grow, according to Faisal, despite criticism from fundamentalist groups eager to snatch such support for themselves.