Anand Mahindra

Anand Mahindra, born 1955, chairs the Mahindra Group, and his principal contribution outside business has been to girls' schooling. In 1996 he started Project Nanhi Kali — the name means 'a little bud' — at the K. C. Mahindra Education Trust, the group's philanthropic arm, with the object of keeping underprivileged girls in school.

The project was conceived against a background of low female literacy, low female workforce participation and the persistence of child marriage and child labour, particularly in rural India. Mahindra's argument for it was that many of the social practices he objected to — dowry deaths, caste discrimination, superstition — were bound up with the fact that girls were not educated, and that educating them would produce both economic and social returns. He designed it deliberately as a sponsorship scheme rather than a grant programme, so that individual Indians and companies could each fund a named girl's schooling for at least a year, which gave the project a broad donor base and made giving to girls' education a habit rather than a one-off.

Project Nanhi Kali is run jointly by the K. C. Mahindra Education Trust and the Naandi Foundation, and provides academic and material support so that girls complete formal schooling to Grade 10. By its own account it has reached about 870,000 girls across fifteen states, from Raichur and Varanasi to the Araku Valley, Bharuch, Darjeeling and the slums of Mumbai. Mahindra was awarded the Padma Bhushan in January 2020.[2][3]