“Education can become a burden when a family has limited resources.”

For Paturi Namratha Siri, a student from Yernagudem village in Andhra Pradesh, there were times when continuing her education felt difficult. She did not always have the learning resources or support she needed after school.

“Understanding some subjects was hard, and I needed additional guidance,” she explains.

Her experience is familiar to Bethala Veera Swami, who is now 58 years old and grew up in the same village several decades earlier.

The village he remembers

Born in 1968, he spent his childhood in Yernagudem, studying from Class 1 to Class 10. His parents were daily-wage agricultural labourers. The family had a small piece of land, but it was not enough to provide for everyone through the year.

“My father and mother were daily-wage workers when I was growing up. They would go to the agricultural fields every day, and our family depended entirely on what they earned that day. This was the reality of my childhood,” he tells The Better India.

His parents nevertheless encouraged him to study.

After school, he went to DNR College in Bhimavaram for intermediate and then joined the College of Engineering at Osmania University in Hyderabad, where he studied mechanical engineering from 1986 to 1990.

He began his professional career in 1991 and spent the following decades working across India and overseas, including in Nigeria, Kuwait, and the UAE. Today, he works as a lead contracts engineer in Abu Dhabi. But while his career took him away from Yernagudem, what he had seen there stayed with him.

“I saw children my age being pulled out of school, not because they lacked ability or ambition, but because their families could not afford to keep them there.”

“I saw children my age being pulled out of school, not because they lacked ability or ambition, but because their families could not afford to keep them there.”

Some children entered the workforce. Others left school because there was little support at home or because they had fewer opportunities to learn beyond the classroom.

“What struck me most was the inequality of opportunity. The gap was not about intelligence or potential, but about access,” he says.

It started with a question among childhood friends 

In 2010, while spending time with childhood friends in Yernagudem, Swami began discussing how they could give something back to the community they had grown up in.

Their answer was education.

They wanted to ‘gift education’ to children they would later call V-Kids, beginning in their own village. On 13 January 2011, the Pragathi Association for Rural Development was registered as a society. The organisation later came to be known as PARD INDIA.

Swami was already working abroad, and he continued his career while he and his friends began building the initiative around their existing jobs, local volunteers, and people from the communities they wanted to work with.

The first programme was launched in August 2011 at the Government MPP Special School in Yernagudem, where Swami had studied. It began with 50 children from Classes 4 and 5.

What happens when the school day ends? 

For many children in these villages, the challenge was finding someone to help them with their studies after school. Their parents often worked as agricultural labourers or in other daily-wage jobs, returning home late with little time to help with lessons.

Swami and his friends wanted to address this gap. Their first initiative, the After School Education Programme (ASEP), gave children a place to continue learning with guidance once their regular school day ended.

“Most of the children we cover have parents who work on daily wages. In the villages, they go to the fields and may not return until four, five, or even six in the evening,” the founder says.

ASEP runs from 3.30 pm to 5.30 pm, six days a week, offering........

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