In its association with Ekal Vidyalaya and its ‘Friends of Tribal Society’ initiative in the Pune and Nashik regions that aims to educate and empower the people in nearly 300 remote and tribal villages, it sponsors teachers and monitors their work. “I visited one of the schools and was taken aback,” says LC. “There were 85 students whom the school decided it couldn’t keep beyond puberty because of the risk. We are trying to keep them on till Class X by providing them with desktop devices.”

Adds Brig (retd) Manoharan, whom LC describes as his ‘one-man army’ for the schools initiative: “We opened a computer lab in the school, made our syllabus for these classes and appointed a teacher after a lot of difficulty finding a young woman who was willing to learn and stay in a tribal area. Now even the children in the lower standards come into the lab to look at the 32 computers we have installed and touch them in wonder!”

Nihilent won the Gandhi Peace Prize from the Government of India for its CSR activities in collaboration with Ekal.

Driven as it is by its firm belief in the power of education and immense potential of the girl child, it sponsors the higher education of financially deserving girls who have enrolled at the Lila Poonawalla Foundation (LPF), sponsoring 50 of the girls selected by the LPF.

On its own, Nihilent also set up a school for orphans in Pune for children picked up from the railway station platforms, where they lived under the bridges and had become drug users and peddlers. Having put them into the formal education system, LC found that they are taking to it. Catching them young, as he says, works!