The Better India · 4 hours ago

He Saw Kids His Age Leave School for Work. 15 Years Later, He Is Supporting 90000 Children in 110+ Villages

Bethala Veera Swami grew up watching classmates his age disappear from school - not because they lacked ability, but because their families couldn't afford to keep them there - and that quiet injustice never left him. Decades later, working as a lead contracts engineer in Abu Dhabi, he co-founded PARD INDIA, an after-school network that has now reached over 90,000 children across 110 villages in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. "The gap was not about intelligence or potential, but about access," he says, and every programme the organization runs - from two-hour evening tutoring sessions to multi-year scholarships - is built to close that gap before a child slips through it. One beneficiary, Yangala Uma Maheshwari, who lost both parents while under the organization's care, now wants "to support underprivileged and needy people, just as this organisation supported me" - a sentence that captures what Swami has been building toward all along. What this story quietly insists is that transformation rarely begins with resources or recognition; it begins with someone who remembered what it felt like to be left behind, and decided that memory was worth something.