Sarthak Foundation

With a vision to have Happy Empowered Children, Sarthak Foundation works on very long term, deep and immersive interventions with marginalised children of Uttar Pradesh - the most populous and one of the poorest states of India - in education, socio-emotional wellbeing, higher studies, and job-readiness so that they are able to grow into educated, employable and fulfilled human beings and break out of poverty.

Our projects reach out to more than 14,000 children, majority of whom are girls, who are the most vulnerable to dropping out of education. 

Sarthak Foundation runs three projects:

1. Yellow Rooms 

“Yellow Rooms are the heart of our work. Situated right in the middle of the community, the Yellow Rooms are safe spaces that work for years and become engines of transformation.”

Yellow Rooms are our community based interventions. Located in 48 communities of Uttar Pradesh, each Yellow Rooms setup comprises two digitally equipped rooms painted bright yellow. We place two permanent Educators there who spend 6 hours each, every day, all year round, for decades in the Yellow Rooms. 

Located in some of the most impoverished slums and rural poor areas of UP, Yellow Rooms not just impart cursory literacy, but do much more - in addition to daily school subject sessions, Yellow Rooms under our SEL curriculums deliver sessions on gender, etiquettes, health, hygiene, yoga, corporate exposure, menstrual hygiene, ethics, values, compassion to animals, caring for the environment, confidence, communication, theatre and much much more.We distribute nutritional elements such as bananas to the children. We counsel parents to reduce instances of child labour, early marriage and alcohol abuse. We also help parents get their government entitlements. Yellow Rooms also ensure that each child is enrolled in a formal school and all of them complete their education. 

Yellow Rooms are completely free of cost for the children and the community.

We reduce school dropout to almost 0%. Girls’ school attendance improves markedly and instances of girls getting married at the age of 13 or 14 become almost zero. 56% of our beneficiaries are girls. 99% of our children who complete Class XII get into higher education or jobs. 

Beyond these statistics and figures, the transformation in the children is profound and striking - simply stand them next to their older siblings who have never been to Yellow Rooms, and the magic becomes immediately apparent.  

2. Sarthak Gurukul 

Sarthak Gurukul is a model rural school for marginalized children based on the Yellow Rooms model of gender equitable, inclusive and value based education. Located in a remote village of district Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, India, Gurukul is attended by about 1000 children from more than 100 villages.

3. Yellow SLATEs (Sciences, Languages, Arts, Theatre and Ethics) 

Yellow SLATEs is our intervention in the government schools of Uttar Pradesh. Government schools are not just free but also offer a free meal to all the children. Yet even the marginally better off people send their children to low fee private schools and government schools of UP are attended by the most marginalised children. You will often find that the proportion of girls is higher in government schools because even the poor will send their boys to low-fee private schools if they can. 

We establish mini-Yellow Rooms inside government schools and use elements of theater and digitally aids to improve children's foundational literacy, numeracy, communication skills and values. We run Yellow SLATEs in 13 government schools of Uttar Pradesh.