Inderjit Khurana

Khurana was born in 1936 and trained as a teacher. She ran her own private school in Bhubaneswar, where she noticed poor working children stopping to look through the school gates.

Travelling by train from Bhubaneswar's station, Khurana repeatedly met children of school age who were working on the platforms and in the carriages. Concluding that if the child could not come to the school then the school had to come to the child, she began by reading stories to them on the platform, and the children themselves asked to be taught to read. Within a few months the first platform school in Bhubaneswar had more than a hundred pupils, taught inside a chalk-marked classroom boundary through song, dance, drama and puppetry, with other teachers volunteering their time.

In 1985 she founded the Ruchika Social Service Organisation to carry the work forward. By the time of the World's Children's Prize citation in 2007, Ruchika ran twelve platform schools, six nurseries, seventy-five slum schools, twenty nursery schools, two 'schools on wheels', HIV and AIDS prevention projects, vocational training, and water and sanitation projects in slums, together with health care, an ambulance service, helplines for children and women, and scholarships for gifted children from poor families.

Khurana was elected an Ashoka Fellow. In 2007 she received the World's Children's Honorary Award from the World's Children's Prize for the Rights of the Child, and the Humanitarian Award from World of Children. She died in 2010; the Ruchika Social Service Organisation continued her work.[2][3][4][5]