“I did not like going to school. The teachers taught us, but sometimes they also scolded and hit us. I never really felt interested in learning,” recalls nine-year-old Jamna Prasad.

Growing up in Bankhedi village in Madhya Pradesh, school was never a place he looked forward to. With teachers juggling several classes at once, asking questions or learning at his own pace was rarely possible.

Today, the Class 5 student eagerly waits for his turn with a tablet that teaches through games. He can now read the alphabet, solve addition and subtraction, and dreams of wearing a police uniform one day.

“I enjoy learning with my friends,” he says. “The Monkey Game is my favourite. Now I understand my studies much better.”

Across six districts of Madhya Pradesh, children who struggled with basic lessons are beginning to learn differently. Behind the change is 32-year-old Shruti Shrivastava, who once imagined serving from inside a government office.

Today, as founder-director of Sashaktikaran Foundation, she oversees Project Neev, which has reached around 900 children across 10 government schools and nine residential hostels, while creating livelihoods for 30 rural women as Shiksha Saathis.

Looking back, she says her purpose did not change. Only the path did.

When the IAS dream came to an end 

Shruti grew up across several towns in Madhya Pradesh because of her parents’ transferable government jobs, exposing her early to inequalities in education and opportunity.

“I’ve always been a compassionate person. As a child, I began noticing the inequalities around me. Seeing children miss out on quality education only because their parents couldn’t afford it, and watching women constantly held back by stereotypes and prejudice, made me realise I wanted to do something to change that,” she tells The Better India.

She studied philosophy at Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi and then spent years preparing for the Civil Services Examination. “For me, becoming a civil servant was never the final dream,” she says. “It was the path towards the larger goal of working with society and for society.”

Across six attempts, she cleared four preliminary examinations and reached the interview stage once. On 16 April 2024, the UPSC results ended a dream she had carried for nearly a decade.

“The UPSC journey ended the day my years-long dream shattered. For the next few weeks, I was trying to hold myself together and come to terms with the fact that the life I had imagined for so many years was no longer going to happen,” she recalls.

She spent May and June recovering and deciding what came next. “Restarting life at the age of 30 wasn’t easy. I was nervous because I was beginning from scratch.”

Yet the larger goal had always been social change. She began to see that there might be another route to it.

A foundation that needed a second beginning

At the same time, Sashaktikaran Foundation in Jaipur was preparing to shut down. Shruti’s college batchmate and close friend Mrinalika Rathore had founded it on 8 March 2017, working with children in low-income schools through Project Parivartan.

Mrinalika later cleared the Civil Services Examination and joined the Odisha cadre as an IAS officer. Government service meant stepping away from the organisation, and there was no obvious successor.

Shruti had known the foundation from the beginning and supported its work informally. When Mrinalika offered her the chance to take over in July 2024, it also........

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