Bipin Shivaji Dhane

Founder

Bipin Shivaji Dhane is the founder of Ayang Trust (2017)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education, livelihood, tribal welfare and women & children from Majuli.

Bipin Shivaji Dhane is an Indian engineer turned educationist who founded The Hummingbird School on Majuli, the river island in Assam, and co-founded Ayang Trust, the non-profit that runs it. He is the trust's managing trustee and executive director. Ayang works with the Mising community on Majuli across school education, community libraries, and livelihoods for handloom weavers.

Early life and education

Dhane is from Satara district in Maharashtra. He studied at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, taking a degree in naval architecture, and graduated in 2013.

Career

After graduating, Dhane worked for about three years as a research engineer with the offshore engineering firm Keppel FELS in Singapore. He resigned in October 2015 and moved to Majuli after visiting a friend working there, initially volunteering as a teacher.

The Hummingbird School opened in January 2017 with about seventy children. Villagers from across the island donated land, bamboo and labour towards the school buildings. Ayang Trust was registered under the Indian Trusts Act in November 2017 by Dhane together with Dharamjeet Kumar and Aswathy Preetha Jayakumar; 'ayang' means love in the language of the Mising people. Alongside the school and its residential home, the trust runs community libraries, supports government schools on the island, and operates a producers' collective and yarn bank for women weavers. By 2026 the school was reported to be teaching more than 300 children, over half of them free of fees.

Recognition

Dhane received the Budding Social Entrepreneur award for 2018-19 from the Rotary Club of Poona Downtown.[2][3][4][5]

Ayang Trust

Ayang Trust ('Ayang' means love in the Mising tribal language) is registered under the Indian Trusts Act, formed in 2017 out of the earlier Hummingbird School set up by 19 Mising villages on Majuli, Assam — the world's largest inhabited river island. It runs the Hummingbird model school, weekly community-library sessions now reaching 2,000+ children across dozens of government schools, and livelihood and disaster-risk-reduction programmes for women farmers and artisans, including flood-affected families, across Assam and into Arunachal Pradesh.

Ayang Trust reports the following, on its own site: