Bina Sheth Lashkari

Bina Sheth Lashkari co-founded Door Step School, which takes schooling to children living on pavements, in slums and at construction sites in Mumbai and Pune. She trained in child psychology and was studying for a master's in social work when the idea took shape.

Visiting a local school, she noticed that children were leaving after three or four years. Talking to their parents explained why: the children were already contributing to the household income and could not be spared. Her conclusion was that the school had to move to the children rather than the other way round. In 1988 she started her first class at Cuffe Parade in Colaba with 25 children whose Banjara parents were working for low wages gutting fish, with the help of Rajani Paranjpe. The Society for Door Step School has worked since 1989 under the principle that the school should come to the children.

The organisation grew into a network across more than 35 urban slum communities in Mumbai and Pune, working on access, retention and the quality of learning: non-formal classes at times and places that suit working families, remedial teaching and reading programmes to keep children in formal school, foundational literacy and numeracy work, and teacher training. Its School on Wheels buses are fitted out as classrooms and stop several times a day at different sites. By 2019 Lashkari was reckoned to have helped organise the education of about 100,000 children in Mumbai over 31 years; the organisation now reports reaching over 120,000 children a year.

In 2016 a Door Step School campaign led to previously unnamed streets in three areas of Mumbai being named after its pupils, intended as an incentive to other children in those neighbourhoods.

On International Women's Day in 2013 she received the Stree Shakti Puraskar from President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan, nominated by the state of Maharashtra for her work in education and training.[2][3]