Skills and vocational training
A certificate that no employer recognises is worse than no training at all. Every course we run is built backwards from a job that exists in that district — welding…
All 26 programmes
Grouped by the kind of need they answer. Each page explains how the programme works, what it costs to run, and what your donation buys.
Learning and livelihood 5
AI and IT training centres
The gap is not talent. A student in a district town has the same capacity as one in a metro and none of the access — no lab, no fast connection, no one who has worked in…
Scholarships and student support
Most students who drop out of higher education in India do not fail. They run out of money in the second year, usually over something small — a hostel deposit, an exam…
Certifying informal workers
A mason with twenty years on site has more skill than a fresh diploma-holder and no paper to prove it. That single gap keeps him on daily wages, out of formal…
Enterprise and self-help groups
Self-help groups fail far more often at selling than at making. The training ends, the loan is disbursed, and nobody helps with the part that decides whether the…
Health and wellbeing 5
Yoga, AYUSH and wellness
Yoga became an export before it became accessible. A month at a wellness retreat costs more than most Indian families earn in a year, while the traditions it draws on…
Health camps and medical care
Most rural health emergencies are late-stage versions of something that was cheap to treat a year earlier. Screening is unglamorous and it is where the difference is…
Mental health and counselling
India has roughly one psychiatrist for every hundred thousand people, almost all of them in cities. For most of the country, help is not expensive so much as…
Disability support and assistive devices
An assistive device is not charity, it is infrastructure. A tricycle is the difference between a man who cannot leave his lane and one who runs a…
Blood, platelet and organ donation
Platelet shortages kill people in India every week, and the reason is almost never that no compatible donor exists nearby. It is that nobody could find them in…
Workers and vulnerable groups 5
Mathadi and worker welfare
A mathadi worker carries loads that would be illegal for a machine to lift without certification, and often does it in rubber slippers. The equipment that would prevent…
Migrant worker support
A worker who moves from Jharkhand to Surat leaves his entitlements behind at the district border. His ration card does not travel, his children lose a school year, and…
Women's dignity and health
Girls leave school over menstruation more often than over fees. The cause is usually a toilet that does not work and no way to manage a period with any…
Senior citizens
The fastest-growing group of Indians living alone is people over seventy whose children moved cities or countries. Most of them are not poor. They are isolated, and…
Legal aid and documentation
A very large share of Indian poverty is administrative. The pension exists, the scholarship exists, the compensation exists, and the family cannot access any of it…
Animals and environment 4
Gaushala and cattle protection
A cow stops producing milk long before she stops needing food. That gap is the whole reason gaushalas exist, and it is why the ones that survive are the ones that plan…
Stray animal care
Culling does not reduce stray populations and it is illegal. Sterilisation and vaccination do, and the arithmetic is unforgiving — a programme has to reach around…
Water, trees and environment
Millions of litres of clean groundwater are pumped out of construction excavations in Indian cities every day and run straight into storm drains, in the same…
Community buildings and shelter
Programmes that run out of borrowed rooms stop when the room is needed for something else. Owning the building is what turns a camp into a…
Faith, culture and pilgrimage 5
Assisted pilgrimage (Yatra Sahayata)
Almost every Indian family has an elderly relative who has wanted to make a particular journey for thirty years and will now never make it — not for want of money, but…
NRI and overseas devotee yatra
Families settled abroad for two generations often want to bring elderly parents on yatra, or to find the village their grandfather left, and have no idea how to arrange…
Festival immersion for visitors
A visitor who watches a Ganesh visarjan from a hotel balcony sees a crowd. A visitor who spends the ten days with a mandal — helping build the pandal, sitting through…
Festivals and community celebration
Festivals are the one time of year when an entire neighbourhood is already gathered, organised and willing. Almost nobody uses…
Heritage, crafts and artisans
Crafts do not die because people stop wanting the objects. They die because the artisan earns less than a construction labourer and does not pass the skill to a child…
Emergency and dignity 2
Disaster rescue and relief
The first six hours of a flood are decided entirely by what was already in the district. Equipment despatched from a state capital after the water rises arrives to do…
Dignity in last rites
Every large Indian city has bodies that nobody claims. They are handled as an administrative matter, which is lawful and entirely without…