Devendra Kumar

Founder

Devendra Kumar is the founder of Ladli Foundation Trust [1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children, healthcare and livelihood from New Delhi.

Devendra Kumar is an Indian social worker and the founder of the Ladli Foundation Trust, a Delhi-based non-profit organisation that works on education, health, menstrual hygiene, livelihoods and gender equality among low-income urban communities. He grew up in a Delhi slum and worked as a child labourer before beginning voluntary work in his twenties.

Early life

According to the Ladli Foundation and to press accounts of his life, Kumar was abandoned with his infant sister in a Delhi slum when he was two years old. He began working at the age of eight, selling balloons on the street, and later volunteered with community policing initiatives run by the Delhi Police.

Career

Kumar established the Ladli Foundation in 2010, an effort that began with his attempt to prevent his younger sister's child marriage. The organisation runs programmes under names including E-Pathanshala (digital learning for out-of-school children), Saheli, Menstrushala (menstrual health), Shagun, JOSH, Punar-Utthan and Swabhimaan, and works on nutrition, water, sanitation and hygiene, and the prevention of substance abuse.

The foundation is registered with NITI Aayog, the Indian government's policy institution, and has been granted special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Kumar also founded Ladli Foundation USA, a 501(c)(3) organisation. The foundation states that its work has reached more than 3.5 million people; a 2026 profile in The Better India put the figure at 2.7 million.

Recognition

The Ladli Foundation states that Kumar has received two national awards from the Government of India and that the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment nominated him for the Padma Shri in 2020.[2][3]

Ladli Foundation Trust

Ladli Foundation Trust, founded in 2012 by Devendra Kumar Gupta in Delhi, works in urban and rural slums on healthcare, education, social protection and livelihoods for vulnerable women and children. The foundation holds UN ECOSOC special consultative status and has filed public interest litigation in the Supreme Court seeking reservation for women lawyers in government legal panels.

Ladli Foundation Trust reports the following, on its own site:

Grassroots initiatives have positively impacted over 3.5 million children, women, adolescents and community members across India
Enabled digital education access for more than 257,000 marginalized students