At 9 am in New Delhi, 28-year-old Rakesh Chitkela adjusts his formal shirt, gathers his notes, and prepares to leave for work at the Ministry of Education.

Hundreds of kilometres away in Sangareddy, Telangana, his mother, Satyamma, pauses mid-task at the school where she works as an ayah (cleaning staff). Someone has just mentioned her son again, the boy who now works with the Government of India.

Her eyes well up, not out of disbelief anymore but gratitude.

There was a time when their mornings began at 4 am, cleaning spaces before sunrise just to make ends meet.

Back then, survival came first. Today, dignity does.

The distance between those two lives is not measured in kilometres, but in years of grit, sacrifice, and an unshakeable belief in education.

A childhood that changed overnight

Rakesh grew up in a modest household near Sangareddy in Telangana, where life, though simple, was stable until it wasn’t, after everything changed in the early 2000s.

He was around 11 years old when his father passed away.

“I was very young then, I don’t even remember how excruciating the pain was, but I know that everything changed after that,” Rakesh tells The Better India. 

What he may not fully remember, his mother lived through every single day.

“Those were incredibly difficult times,” recalls Satyamma. “His sudden loss left our entire family shattered. Being less educated and dependent, everything felt like a challenge while running a family alone.”

With no steady support system and limited income, she stepped into the role of sole provider, a responsibility that came with both financial strain and emotional weight.

Working as an ayah at St. Anthony's High School at Shanti Nagar, she earned around Rs 6,000 a month, barely enough to sustain a family. There were suggestions from relatives, advice wrapped in practicality: move the children to a government school, cut expenses, and think of immediate survival.

But Satyamma refused to compromise where it mattered most.

“Many people told us to change schools,” Rakesh says. “But my mother didn’t agree. She wanted us to have a good quality education, no matter what.”

Even when circumstances forced early decisions, like arranging his elder sister’s marriage, Satyamma held her ground on one condition: her daughter’s education would continue.

“They agreed,” Rakesh says. “She completed her graduation and master’s, and now my sister works in the state government.”

In a life defined by constraints, education became their one non-negotiable.

The weight of mornings no child should carry

Soon after his father’s death, Rakesh began........

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