Building an Empire of Belonging

How Shiksharth is Reimagining Childhood, Learning, and Love in the Forests of Sukma

“Am I safe? Am I learning? Am I loved?”
These three questions are not just aspirations, they are the foundation upon which Shiksharth Trust is building something extraordinary in Sukma, Chhattisgarh.

Where We Work and Why It Matters

Sukma, tucked into the southernmost tip of Chhattisgarh, is one of India’s most underserved districts. The children here grow up surrounded by dense forests, rich culture, and deep community ties, yet historically, formal education has remained distant, inaccessible, or simply disconnected from their lived reality. Schools existed. Children often did not.

Shiksharth Trust arrived not to fix a broken system, but to imagine what education could truly feel like when it starts with the child.

Positive Childhood Experiences: The Science of What Children Need

Research in developmental psychology has made one thing unmistakably clear: the quality of a child’s earliest experiences shapes the architecture of their brain, their capacity to learn, to trust, to recover from difficulty, and to thrive.

Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) are not about removing hardship. They are about ensuring that every child, regardless of geography or circumstance, has access to:

• A safe, stable environment where they feel physically and emotionally protected

• Nurturing relationships with adults who see and value them

• Opportunities to play, explore, and make meaning of their world

• A sense of belonging to their community, their language, their identity

• The experience of being heard and having agency

When children have these experiences consistently, adversity does not break them. Without them, even the best curricula cannot take root.

This is the lens through which Shiksharth approaches every decision, from how walls are painted to how a child is greeted each morning.

Social-Emotional Learning: Education That Sees the Whole Child

Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL, is the process through which children develop the skills to understand themselves, relate to others, and make responsible decisions. It is the invisible infrastructure beneath every academic achievement.

SEL encompasses five core competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. But in the context of Sukma’s communities, SEL at Shiksharth takes on a deeply local texture.

It looks like a child who learns to name what they feel before they act on it. It looks like a classroom where conflict is handled with words, not silence or fear. It looks like a teacher who notices the quiet child in the corner — and pulls them gently back into the world.

SEL is not a subject at Shiksharth. It is woven into the fabric of every interaction, the morning circle, the peer collaboration, the way a mistake is treated as a stepping stone rather than a source of shame.

The Model School: An Ecosystem, Not Just a Building

Walk into a school and you begin to understand that something different is happening here. Education is not contained within textbooks. It is everywhere and that is entirely intentional.

The Walls That Teach: BALA

BALA, Building As Learning Aid transforms every surface of the school into a learning opportunity. Alphabets, numbers, maps, stories, and concepts are painted across walls, floors, and staircases. A child waiting for class begins to read without realising they are reading. A child walking to the water tap passes a multiplication table and pauses. Learning seeps into the body before the mind even registers it.

For children who may not have books at home, the school itself becomes a library they inhabit all day.

Translating Knowledge Into Their Own Language

Language is not just a medium of communication, it is a medium of identity. When children are taught only in a language distant from their mother tongue, they learn to see themselves as outsiders in their own education.

Shiksharth takes the radical step of translating books and learning materials into the local language ensuring that children understand in their bones, not just in their heads. When a child can explain what they have learned in their own words, in their own tongue, to their grandmother that is when education has truly happened.

Attendance as a Mirror of Trust

Attendance is often treated as a disciplinary metric. At Shiksharth, it is understood as a barometer of something far more profound: do children want to come? Do they feel the school belongs to them?

By focusing on joy, safety, and genuine engagement, Shiksharth has worked to bring children back not through incentive schemes or fear of punishment, but because the school has become a place worth coming to. Attendance rises when children feel seen. It rises when they feel safe. It rises when they are loved.

From Pedagogy to STEM and Everything in Between

Shiksharth refuses to limit its imagination. The model school is built to give children access to the full spectrum of education, from strong foundational pedagogy grounded in how children actually learn, to hands-on STEM exploration that opens minds to possibility. The goal is not to produce a particular kind of student, but to make visible to every child the full range of what they could become.

A Note from the Ground: What I Have Come to Understand

As a fellow working with Shiksharth, I came in with frameworks like theory of change, outcome indicators, programme logic. What I found was something that resists easy measurement, because it operates at the level of dignity.

I have watched a child trace the letters on a painted wall, mouthing sounds slowly, looking up to check if someone noticed. I have sat in a classroom where children argued — not fought, argued — about the right answer, in their own language, with confidence in their own intelligence.

I have watched attendance climb — not because someone mandated it, but because the children told their siblings: come, this place is ours.

Shiksharth is not building a system. Systems can be dismantled. They are building an empire — an empire of belonging, of curiosity, of care.

An empire where a child walks through the gate each morning and the gate says: you are safe here. Where the walls say: you are learning here. Where the teacher’s eyes say: you are loved here.