About us
Fourteen years in
the same four
streets
A panghat is the village well — the place everyone walks to, and where news, help and gossip get exchanged. We run eleven learning centres and a daily kitchen across Pune's eastern belt, for about 2,400 children a year.
Why the name
A panghat is
the village well
The place everyone walks to, where the water is, and where news, help and a fair amount of gossip get exchanged along the way. Nobody built it as a service. It works because everybody is there anyway.
That is roughly what a learning centre turns into by its third year. It stops being a place children are sent and becomes the place they go, then the place their mothers meet, then the place a teacher hears that a family is leaving for the cane season before the school does.
We have never been able to make that happen faster than about three years, and we have stopped trying. It is the entire reason we work in four neighbourhoods instead of four districts.
- 0Children a year
- 0Learning centres
- 0%Of every rupee, on programmes
- 0yrsIn the same neighbourhoods
How it went
Fourteen years,
including the mistakes
- 2011
One rented room in Ramtekdi, eleven children, two of us. No registration and no plan beyond the term.
- 2014
Trust registered, 12A and 80G granted. The first year we could give anybody a receipt.
- 2017
The kitchen. Started because attendance in the second hour was collapsing and we finally asked why.
- 2019
Went back through eight years of records and found that a mother's income predicted a child staying in school better than anything we were doing. Started the savings groups.
- 2022
Eleven centres. Two of them in Wagholi never filled, and one closes this March.
- 2024
Added an eye test to the health check almost as an afterthought and found forty-one children who could not see a blackboard.
How we work
Three rules
we do not bend
- 01
Eighteen to a room
Every request to squeeze in a nineteenth gets refused. It has cost us donors and it is not negotiable.
- 02
We publish the year we did badly
Overheads hit twenty per cent in 2023–24 because we moved office twice. It is on the first page of that report, not the last.
- 03
Anyone can walk in
Any working day, unannounced. A centre that only looks good on a scheduled visit is not a centre worth funding.
In their words
What people say,
once we have asked them
- Placeholder
Replace this with a real quote from a real donor, used with their permission. Until then it stays visibly marked as a placeholder, because a fabricated review on a charity's website is not a design detail, it is a lie about the people who gave.
- Placeholder
A parent's words belong to the parent. Ask, record the permission in writing, and only then put it on a page that is asking strangers for money.
- Placeholder
A corporate partner will usually have a communications team that must approve any quote before it is published. Get that approval in writing before this goes live.
- Placeholder
The easiest real quotes to collect are from volunteers, who are usually delighted to be asked. Start there.
Where we are
Office — visitors welcome, call first
Near Ramtekdi Industrial Estate, HadapsarPune, Maharashtra 411028
Centres across Hadapsar, Kharadi, Wagholi, Yerawada, Katraj and Pune.
Open in Maps