Shaila Brijnath

Shaila Brijnath is the founder of Aasraa Trust in Dehradun, which works with children living in the city's slums and on its streets.

She had spent most of her life outside India, in the United States and then London, where she worked as an equity trader, and returned to Dehradun in middle age. Volunteering with an organisation working on education for poor children in the city, she found conditions worse than she had expected, including children as young as two and four already exposed to substance abuse. Dehradun's growth as the capital of Uttarakhand had drawn migrants into more than a hundred informal settlements along the Bindal and Rispana rivers, home to well over a hundred thousand people without basic services; children there were largely out of school, poorly fed, and often working, begging or picking rags.

She founded Aasraa Trust in 2009 on the view that education cannot be delivered in isolation from the rest of a child's circumstances - that there is no point teaching a child who is hungry, ill or cold. She began with an after-school programme called Wings of Doon in the Bindal Bridge slum, with 35 children. Neelu Khanna joined her in 2010, and in 2011 the two started Street Smart, which uses art, craft, music, languages and computers to bring children found on the streets to a point where they can enter mainstream school. Alongside teaching, the trust provides nutrition, healthcare, clothing, shelter homes and vocational training.

Its programmes now include community learning centres, mobile learning and education carts, an anti-begging campaign, mobile computer laboratories, a centre for children with special needs, a girls' education programme and support into higher education, with a mainstreaming route through partner schools and the National Institute of Open Schooling. Aasraa reports reaching more than 28,600 children through over 80 centres in the Dehradun, Udham Singh Nagar and Pauri Garhwal districts of Uttarakhand.[2][3]