ILLUSTRATIVE STORY — the shape is real and worth keeping, but the specifics are invented. Replace with the client’s own account of something that did not work.

Wagholi II opened in 2022 in a lane we had misread. The families there send their children to a private low-fee school twenty minutes away and did not want what we were offering, which is a perfectly reasonable position for them to take.

Enrolment never went past nineteen children in a room built for forty. We knew by the second term. We kept it open for two more years.

We kept it open because closing a centre reads as failure in an annual report, and because the staff there had done nothing wrong, and because it is always easier to write one more hopeful paragraph than one honest sentence.

It closes in March. The teacher moves to Ramtekdi, where there is a waiting list. The two years of rent are in the accounts and are not hidden in a line called programme support.