Shantha Sinha of MV Foundation challenged and changed long-established international and national beliefs around poverty and education that have become self-limiting. In the process, she is creating a cultural transformation that has the potential to change the face of the country.

Established wisdom goes that because grinding poverty exists, it is not possible for the poor to send their children to school. Reduction of poverty is considered to be a precondition to school enrolment and education.

But Shantha Sinha challenged that cycle of cause and effect calling it the classic poverty argument and says that the answer to this question lies in how it is framed. If the question is framed as “isn’t it true that if a family is extremely poor and in dire straits then the parents would need to send their children to work?” Then the answer would be ‘yes’. But if the question is framed as “Are all families that currently send their children to work so poor that they cannot survive without the child’s income?” The answer becomes ‘no’. Therefore, while poverty is an important factor, it’s not the only factor. There are other social factors that if addressed can get poor children into schools.

In one dramatic display that rather than poverty causing lack of education, it is lack of education that perpetuates poverty; MVF swept nearly a 1000 children into schools in a mandal (part of a district). This created a labour shortage that had to be filled in by adult labour at adult rates. And this in turn increased the income of the family.

MVF uses an interlinked set of strategies that begin with creating strong village community alignment on the non-negotiability of children being in school, then it expands the capacity of existing schools and after that ropes in teachers to become watchdogs of child rights and to sign learning guarantees and take on the onus of ensuring that children actually learn.

The impact has been that nearly 300,000 children have been enrolled in schools by this organization that also monitors nearly 650,000 children in schools on a daily basis in over 4000 villages. A volunteer force of 80,000 does the daily monitoring.