The knock on the door has the sharp sense of ownership. L* walks in, a cheeky grin on her face and an assured sense of belonging.

She plonks herself down and makes herself at home as I talk to Shweta Tara Vandana director of education at Kranti, India’s first residential school for the daughters of sex workers, run by the daughters of sex workers.

Set in a pine forest in the higher reaches of Himachal Pradesh, puddles of snow glistening in the April sun, Kranti—the word means revolution—is deliberately small with a capacity of 30 students at any given time.

Right now there are 26, with four spaces kept vacant for emergencies—like the seven-and-a-half-year-old who told one of the aunties in Kamathipura that her father was raping her. The aunties gave the father a good beating before bringing the child to Kranti, where her extracurriculars include tabla lessons and karate.

Like almost all the girls here, L too has a hard backstory that includes a mother who tried to sell her. Today, what you see is a confident girl who clearly belongs at what is likely the first home she has known.

There is nothing small about Kranti’s scale of ambition. The girls come from the red-light areas of Kamathipura, Sangli, Bangalore and Delhi. Many are already 10 years behind in formal education. Almost all are first-generation learners. Most have experienced trauma, including sexual abuse.

Nearly 80% of the girls have gone on to higher education and many study abroad on scholarship, says Robin Chaurasiya, the co-founder along with Bani Das, a single mother, who set up Kranti in 2011. Five years later, Robin was a top 10 finalist for the million-dollar Global Teacher Prize awarded by the Varkey Foundation in partnership with UNESCO.

More than rescuing girls, Kranti is training future leaders and change agents. “In development spaces, survivors are often welcomed as storytellers, but rarely trusted as decision-makers,” Shweta Tara said in an address to the United Nations Commission for Women in March this year. “Yet the girls I grew up with are not stories waiting to be told. They are leaders waiting to be trusted.”

Shweta Tara knows what she is talking about. The daughter of a sex worker, she grew up in Kamathipura and at 16 joined Kranti as part of its first batch of students. It wasn’t easy. She struggled academically, having only studied at a Marathi-medium government school. The teachers, she remembers, were “sweet and kind, but most of the time didn’t show up.” There........

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