The Better India · 9 hours ago

After Upsc Failure, Shruti Shrivastava Is Changing Rural Education for 900 Children in Mp

After six failed attempts at India's most competitive civil service exam, Shruti Shrivastava could have measured her worth by what she didn't achieve. Instead, she took over a struggling foundation and built Project Neev, which now reaches 900 rural children across Madhya Pradesh by pairing adaptive learning tablets with women from the same villages - women who, like nine-year-old Jamna Prasad, once believed learning simply wasn't for them. "I did not like going to school," Jamna recalls; today he eagerly waits for his turn with a tablet and dreams of becoming a police officer. What Shruti built is not just an education program but a quiet reordering of who gets to be capable - children learn at their own pace, and the women guiding them discover, often for the first time, that their potential was never the problem. "We don't want to touch lives briefly and move on," she says, and the numbers bear her out: hundreds of children advancing multiple learning levels, thirty rural women now recognized as leaders in their own communities, and a founder who learned that the path to public service was never as narrow as one examination.