Kiran Modi

Kiran Modi is the founder and managing trustee of Udayan Care, a Delhi organisation she started in 1994 that has become one of the principal Indian voices on how children without parental care should be raised and what happens to them once they leave care.

The organisation began in personal loss. Her son Udayan died in 1994 at the age of twenty-one while studying in the United States; going through his papers afterwards, Modi and her husband discovered that he had been putting aside money from his allowance and part-time work to support orphaned children in Africa. Modi, who holds a doctorate in American literature from IIT Delhi and had worked across media, health and children's theatre, resolved to carry on what he had started. Visiting Indian orphanages, she was struck less by the lack of money than by caregivers who had no understanding of how traumatised children behave, and set out to build a single family-like home instead of another institution.

That home became the Udayan Ghar model, launched in 1996: small group homes of a dozen or so children run by long-term caregivers and volunteer mentor parents who stay with the same children for years, on the argument that stable relationships, not buildings, produce good outcomes. Modi herself serves as a mentor mother. In 2002 she added the Udayan Shalini Fellowship, which pairs girls from poor families with individual mentors and funds their education through school and university; it has supported around 10,000 girls in some 21 cities. Information technology centres followed in 2004 and an aftercare programme in 2008. Udayan Care now works in 45 cities across 18 states.

Alongside the direct work Modi has built a research and advocacy strand on alternative care, founding and editing Institutionalised Children: Explorations and Beyond, an international journal on the subject, and campaigning for standards of care and for the rights of young people leaving institutional care. She is an Ashoka Fellow, and Udayan Care has received the National Award for Child Welfare from the President of India.[2][3][4]