Shekhar Mahajan

Founder

Shekhar Mahajan is the founder of Sahyog Care For You (2002)[1], an Indian non-profit working on women & children, education and human rights from New Delhi.

Shekhar Mahajan is an Indian lawyer and social worker who founded Sahyog Care For You, a Delhi-based non-governmental organisation, in 2002. The organisation works on child protection and rehabilitation, child education, women's livelihoods, youth skills training, water and sanitation and rural development, and is best known for rescuing children from bonded and hazardous labour.

Early life and education

Mahajan holds a postgraduate degree in social work (MSW) and a degree in law. He practised as a lawyer before moving into the voluntary sector.

Career

Mahajan has described his decision to leave legal practice as the result of encounters with children working rather than attending school; in one account he recalls a boy helping his father at a tea stall in a Delhi resettlement colony, whose father questioned the value of schooling. He founded Sahyog Care For You in 2002 with a group of friends, initially concentrating on child education.

The organisation subsequently added programmes in women's livelihoods (2012), youth skill development (2014), tree planting (2016), water, sanitation and hygiene (2017), rural development (2018), and from 2019 rescue work against child trafficking and child labour together with child rehabilitation. It has run programmes in nine Indian states. Working with government departments, labour officers and the police, Sahyog reported 148 rescue missions over five years, freeing 2,788 children — 2,065 boys and 723 girls — from bonded and hazardous labour in premises including steel factories and embroidery workshops.[2][3][4]

Sahyog Care For You

Sahyog Care For You is a Delhi-based voluntary organisation registered in 2002 that works on child rescue and rehabilitation, education, women's empowerment and skill development. Working with police and child welfare authorities, it has helped free thousands of children from bonded labour in factories across Delhi-NCR and supported their return to school.

Sahyog Care For You reports the following, on its own site: