Every district collector's office has a chair reserved for visitors, but in Gujarat's Chhota Udepur, collector Gargi Jain chose a different one: a plastic chair inside a government school classroom, pulled up beside girls who had never had an officer of her rank sit down and simply listen. There was no inspection register, no entourage, just conversation. 

Today, those students do not call her "Madam Collector." They call her Collector Didi, and that shift in address has become the foundation of an initiative quietly reshaping how tribal girls in the district experience school.

Jain, a 2015-batch IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre, took charge of Chhota Udepur, one of the state's most tribal-dominated districts, in February 2025. 

The district, home mainly to the Rathva community, was carved out of Vadodara district in 2013 and remains a place where girls are frequently the first in their families to attend school, with financial hardship, early marriage, and a lack of visible role models pushing many out of the classroom before they finish it.

The pattern is not unique to Chhota Udepur; poverty and early marriage have long driven dropout across Gujarat's tribal belt, which is why sustained, trust-based outreach matters as much as scholarships or infrastructure.

From "madam collector" to "collector didi"

Jain calls the initiative ‘Collector in Classroom’. For the past year, she has set aside time every week to visit girls' schools across tribal blocks of the district, turning ordinary classrooms into spaces where students speak freely about their dreams, fears, and family pressures. 

"When I became the........

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