On a Saturday afternoon in Kodaikanal's Kombai-Perungadu tribal settlement, a 5-year-old girl appears on a video call, her hair neatly plaited, her blue frock crisp. She offers a shy smile. "Hi! Yen per Karnika (My name is Karnika)," she says in Tamil.

She is delighted to have someone asking her question after question, and even the poor network connection, which keeps cutting out her voice, doesn't dampen her enthusiasm. She talks about her friends, her teacher, and her dream of becoming a police officer one day. "I like school a lot, and I like my miss," she says.

Before the conversation can continue, Karnika is gone, pulled into a circle of 30 children who join hands and begin to chant — not the alphabet or times tables, but rhymes about cleanliness and friendship, led by a teacher, while parents watch proudly from the sidelines.

Not long ago, this scene would have been unthinkable. Karnika had drifted in and out of a local primary school where lessons felt distant and uninspiring, and where the pull of the fields was always stronger. Like her parents, and their parents before them, she was expected to grow into a life of farm labour rather than one shaped by a classroom.

That changed when a 'Saturday school' arrived in her village, drawing in 25 children who, for the first time, found learning to be something to look forward to. One Saturday became many, and over two years, the group grew to include more than 52 first-generation learners like Karnika — children now able to step away from the fields and into an education their families had never had access to.

Making this possible took the decades of experience and determination of an 82-year-old educator, whose work teaching children in Delhi's slums eventually led her, many years later, to bring that same mission to the remote corners of Tamil Nadu.

A promise made in Delhi's slums.

Tucked into Attuvampatti, six kilometres from Kodaikanal town, My School Satya Surabhi has been educating underserved children for 27 years (since 1999), completely free of cost, save for transportation.

Founded by Padmini, who began teaching at the age of 19 in Calcutta and still walks into a classroom daily at 82, the school runs on a philosophy she calls integrated learning: no subject taught in isolation, every lesson threaded with geography, history, and science until it becomes, in her words, "an imprint on the child."

It's a philosophy she arrived at slowly, shaped by a career that moved from Calcutta to Delhi's British School to Kodaikanal. But its real origin, she says, goes back further than any classroom. While teaching in Delhi, she accompanied students to a nearby slum twice a week and watched the gap between privileged and underprivileged children play out in real time.

"It became a part of my mindset that I must do something to elevate the status of these people," she says. "The only way I could do it is not by feeding them, not by giving them clothes, but by giving them a good education."

When she eventually settled in Kodaikanal and was offered the chance to start a well-resourced, exclusive school, she chose differently. 50 children, one paid teacher, and herself as the other, teaching those who came to learn for free.

Before that, in 1972, she spent four years teaching at a middle school in Benin City, Nigeria, where she saw children from different socioeconomic backgrounds treated as equals. The experience shaped her understanding that, at the core, people share the same basic needs and humanity.

That same instinct resurfaced decades later, this time pointing her towards Kombai.

"I had wanted to reach the tribal settlement there for years. The occasion that finally took me there was solemn — a visit to immerse a relative's ashes in the river. But what stayed with me afterward was the children. Most of them, I discovered, weren't in school at all," she recalls.

Of the approximately 50-60 families across various settlements of the Kombai tribe, most children do not attend school.........

© The Better India