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By:

Shoumojit Banerjee

27 August 2024 at 9:57:52 am

Classroom of Courage

In drought-scarred Maharashtra, a couple’s experiment in democratic schooling is turning child beggars into model citizens In the parched stretches of Maharashtra, from Solapur to the drought-hit villages of Marathwada, a modest social experiment has quietly unfolded for nearly two decades. It is neither a grand government scheme nor a corporate-backed charity. Since 2007, the Ajit Foundation, founded by Mahesh and Vinaya Nimbalkar, has worked with children living at the sharpest edges of...

Classroom of Courage

In drought-scarred Maharashtra, a couple’s experiment in democratic schooling is turning child beggars into model citizens In the parched stretches of Maharashtra, from Solapur to the drought-hit villages of Marathwada, a modest social experiment has quietly unfolded for nearly two decades. It is neither a grand government scheme nor a corporate-backed charity. Since 2007, the Ajit Foundation, founded by Mahesh and Vinaya Nimbalkar, has worked with children living at the sharpest edges of society in Maharashtra. The foundation has become a home for out-of-school children, those who have never enrolled, the children of migrant labourers and single parents, and those who scavenge at garbage dumps or drift between odd jobs. To call their foundation an “NGO” is to miss the point. Vinaya Nimbalkar describes it as a “democratic laboratory”, where education is not merely instruction but an initiation into citizenship. The couple were once government schoolteachers with the Solapur Zilla Parishad, leading stable lives. Yet what they witnessed unsettled them: children who had never held a pencil, begging at traffic signals or sorting refuse for a living. Prompted by this reality, the Nimbalkars resigned their jobs to work full-time for the education of such children. Leap of Faith They began modestly, teaching children in migrant settlements in Solapur and using their own salaries to pay small honorariums to activists. Funds soon ran dry, and volunteers drifted away. Forced out of their home because of their commitment to the cause, they started a one-room school where Vinaya, Mahesh, their infant son Srijan and forty children aged six to fourteen lived together as an unlikely family. The experiment later moved to Barshi in the Solapur district with support from Anandvan. Rural hardship, financial uncertainty and the pandemic repeatedly tested their resolve. At one stage, they assumed educational guardianship of nearly 200 children from families that survived by collecting scrap on the village outskirts. Eventually, the foundation relocated to Talegaon Dabhade near Pune, where it now runs a residential hostel. Twenty-five children currently live and study there. The numbers may seem modest, but the ambition is not. Democracy in Practice What distinguishes the Ajit Foundation is not only who it serves but also how it operates. Within its walls, democracy is practised through a Children’s Gram Panchayat and a miniature Municipal Council elected by the children themselves. Young candidates canvass, hold meetings and present their budgets. Children maintain accounts and share decisions about chores, activities and certain disciplinary matters. In a country where democratic culture is often reduced to voting, the foundation’s approach is quietly radical. It treats children from marginalised backgrounds as citizens in formation. The right to choose — whether to focus on sport, cooking, mathematics or cultural activities — is respected. “We try never to take away what is their own,” says Vinaya Nimbalkar. Rather than forcing every child into a uniform academic mould, individual abilities are encouraged. A boy skilled in daily calculations may not be pushed into hours of bookish study; a girl who excels in cooking may lead the kitchen team. For children who have known only precarity, standing for election, managing a budget or speaking at a meeting can be transformative. On International Women’s Day, the foundation seeks visibility not just for praise but for partnership. If you are inspired by their mission, consider supporting or collaborating—your involvement can help extend opportunities to more children in need.

From Rust to Resurgence: The Remaking of Indian Railways in an Era of Aspiration

Part 3 : The concluding chapter of our three-part series traces the Indian Railway’s astonishing acceleration into a modern, digital and greener future.

Indian Railways has always been more than a transport utility. It has been a force that moulded markets, stitched together societies and sustained the world’s largest democracy through war, famine, migration and modernisation. If the first century of its existence chronicled the improbable birth of an iron network under colonial rule, and the next seven decades told the story of reinvention and digitisation in a fractious young republic, the years between 2014 and 2025 mark the most sweeping transformation in the system’s history. In sheer scale, ambition and execution, the past decade stands apart.


What emerged was not just more spending or better technology, but a reshaping of railways as an institution anchored to inclusion, sustainability, transparency and growth. The system’s centre of gravity moved firmly toward the future.


Comprehensive Overhaul

In barely eleven years, Indian Railways laid nearly 35,000 kilometres of new track and renewed 46,000 kilometres of existing lines. By 2025, the network is expected to stretch to 1.2 lakh kilometres, a continental system in all but name. Electrification, long a laggard, leapt astonishingly from just 6.3 percent of the network pre-2014 to over 98 percent by 2025. This transition, one of the fastest anywhere, has cut fuel dependence, curbed emissions, improved reliability and paved the way for higher speeds.


Safety infrastructure grew at breakneck speed as well. More than 14,000 over- and under-bridges were constructed in the decade - nearly triple the number built in the first 67 years after independence. Level crossings, long a menace, have steadily vanished. Stations, too, entered an entirely new era. The Amrit Bharat Station Scheme, covering over 1,300 stations, introduced concourses, digital signage, waiting areas, and accessibility upgrades that rival international terminals more than the dingy halls of rail travel past.


If infrastructure is the skeleton of a railway, engineering achievements are its feats of athleticism. The Chenab Bridge, the world’s highest arch railway span, inaugurated in 2025, is both structural audacity and geopolitical signal - a link across Himalayan gorges that once rendered mobility unthinkable. Its companion, the Anji Khadd Bridge, India’s first cable-stayed railway bridge, showcases a system no longer content to import innovation.


These structures have seeped into popular consciousness. Travellers speak of the Chenab with a mixture of pride and disbelief; locals marvel at what once seemed a Himalayan fantasy. The revived Pamban Bridge, with its marine winds and monsoon storms, remains a testament to human stubbornness against nature’s hazards. Together, they reflect a railway that now builds at the edge of possibility.


A decade ago, Indian rail travel evoked images of queues, dim platforms and the suspicion of delay. Today, the system moves closer to a public utility calibrated to dignity, speed and choice.


The Vande Bharat Express, now with over 156 trains in operation, embodies that shift. To a farmer dispatching his son to college in another state, these services are not abstractions. They mean a faster journey home, a travel experience that no longer feels second-class, and most importantly, a sense that modernity is not confined solely to big cities.


The digital layer of the railway expanded just as swiftly. Nearly 6,000 stations now offer free Wi-Fi, turning platforms into digital plazas. More than 2,000 stations run on solar power - an early sign of a network drifting steadily toward carbon neutrality. Cleanliness, once a chronic complaint, improved with the rollout of 80,000 bio-toilets, eliminating the century-old practice of open discharge and reinforcing India’s broader sanitation revolution.


Back-end capacity surged too: 7,134 new coaches, 41,929 wagons and 1,681 locomotives were produced in a single fiscal year - output that dwarfs previous decades and positions India as an exporter of rolling-stock expertise.


Geographic Transformation

Perhaps the most powerful transformation of the past decade is geographic. For the first time in independent India, the remote northeastern states were given direct railway access. The arrival of the first trains brought more than speed: it brought medicine, trade, tourism, and a sense of recognition long missing from these frontier regions.


Connectivity has altered the rhythms of markets, schools, hospitals and households. It has reinforced cultural ties to the rest of the country and offered young people opportunities once locked behind geography.


Elsewhere, religious and cultural circuits from Varanasi to Rameswaram have benefitted from improved access, allowing pilgrim and tourist movement to expand with newfound ease. The railway’s quiet power has always been to make the country feel smaller; now it makes it feel more equal.


Indian Railways has long been the sovereign mover of goods. Yet between 2014 and 2025, that role intensified into economic strategy.


Freight loading reached a record 1,610 million tonnes in FY2025, almost 1.6 times the figure in 2014. The near-completion of the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) has reoriented logistics from a lumbering drag to a competitive advantage. Faster, cheaper and more predictable freight flows have lowered logistics costs nationwide and contributed to the rise of Tier-2 and Tier-3 industrial clusters.


In rural belts, small manufacturers and farmers now use freight services to reach markets in days rather than weeks. One farmer recalls how perishable vegetables once wilted in transit; now, the time saved translates directly into income. Similar gains ripple through small workshops and processing units that feed India’s manufacturing chain.


The public’s faith in railways rests on a single non-negotiable promise: safety. In the past decade, that promise took technological form. Railway accidents have today dropped threefold, aided by upgraded tracks, improved signalling and anti-collision systems. By late 2024, CCTV networks covered over 1,051 stations, greatly enhancing surveillance and deterrence. Women travellers feel much safer as a result today than at any other time.


Most consequential is Kavach, India’s indigenous train-protection system. Successfully tested on major routes, it marks the shift from imported safety protocols to home-grown engineering. Budget allocations for safety have multiplied fivefold, embedding resilience into the system instead of reacting to tragedy.


With its near-universal electrification, India is sprinting toward its climate commitments; railways alone cut millions of tonnes of emissions each year. The shift toward solar-powered stations strengthens this progress, while the broader pivot toward public transport supports India’s net-zero ambitions for 2030 and beyond.


Indian rail expertise, once inward-facing, is now a global commodity. Consultancy arms of Indian Railways along with the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation advise projects in Jakarta, Saudi Arabia, Kenya and other emerging markets. Under the PM Gati Shakti project, multimodal logistics - rail, road, port and air - are being integrated into an unprecedented national architecture of movement.


Between 2014 and 2025, Indian Railways have changed more rapidly than in any comparable period of its existence. It has expanded faster, built bigger, digitised deeper and greened itself more aggressively than ever before. But beyond these metrics lies a subtler reshaping of the social contract between citizen and state.


Railways have long touched Indian lives intimately by carrying families to weddings, students to cities, migrants to workplaces of opportunity and millions to temples, markets and workplaces. What the past decade has done is restore to this vast system a sense of possibility.


Indian Railways today is a network of futures. Its progress hints at a country unwilling to be stranded by its past and determined instead to ride the rails of its own making toward a more inclusive, modern and prosperous tomorrow.

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