Varun shrivastava

Varun Shrivastava is a young social activist from Nagpur, who is working for the upliftment of Under Privileged street children. He is an IIT Kharagpur Alumni, working as a Deputy Manager at a Power sector company, NTPC Ltd. He is well known for his notable work of bringing street children into main-stream. He is the Founder of UPAY( Under Privileged Advancement by Youth) NGO, Which is Providing free of cost education to 1200 Under Privileged Children at 20 different centers across the country . He is popularly known as a Man, turning Footpaths into School, who has started a famous street to school campaign in many cities. Times of India referred him as a Big Brother to street kids. He has been considered among top 10 ordinary Indians doing extraordinary things by Lokmat samachar and many other social media groups. He has inspired hundreds of youth from different backgrounds like doctors, Engineers, and teachers to take up the street children cause and given them a motto of Reach & Teach underprivileged children. He has replaced begging in the hands of street children bowls by books.
Early life
He has a very humble upbringing in a farmer family of a small village of Jhansi District. He got admission in IIT Kharagpur and completed his graduation in 2009. He worked briefly at Madrid, Spain on a telecommunication Project. Later, He joined NTPC Mouda as a Power Engineer. Though he started his social work journey during his IIT Kharagpur days but it was year 2010 when he formally started a group called UPAY with the help of two socially motivated friends in a small village Kumbhari, Near Nagpur Maharshtra . UPAY got registered in 2011 as an NGO. The purpose of UPAY was to help underprivileged children in education so that no child is left behind because of lack of guidance. Soon he has been joined by other engineers. Now UPAY is running 20 centers across the country with 1200 children are getting quality Education with the help of 200 volunteers . It makes, UPAY the largest organization in the field of education without any full-time social activist .
Spreading Education
Including Varun, All the volunteers are working professionals who contribute after their office commitments. He got deeply hurt by the condition of poor street children by seeing them every day begging at traffic signals . He decided to bring these forgotten children in main stream with the powerful tool of education. He started one of the unique initiative called Footpathshala for the street children in October 2015 . It’s an open school which runs at footpaths and provides basic education to street children.
Varun dreams “one day will come when not a single child will sleep hungry at footpaths , when every child will get ready in the morning to go to school not to some dhaba or restaurant for cleaning the utensils, not to some traffic signals for begging and not to some street for picking up the rags“
He has started to get recognition for his work and many volunteers got inspired by him and they joined his movement. Now footpathshala is running I Nagpur, Pune, Gurgaon and Mumabi and hundreds of street children are getting basic education and then 80% of them got enrolled in schools. He has delivered guest lectures at many top colleges and universities .
Relief Work during Nepal Earthquake
When a tragic earthquake struck in Nepal. Thousands of people died, thousands of people gone missing. Help poured in from all over the world. But the most difficult part was to reach and deliver help at affected villages in mountains. He has chosen the uphill task of carrying relief work in mountains. 16 volunteers, mostly college students came forward to join him in this mission. He led a 16 members team and set up a relief camp for 1 week at Nepal. They started their journey o 08th May 2015 . His team encountered near death experience when another powerful earthquake of 7.4 magnitude struck Nepal. His team survived and returned safely after completing the mission.
Awards & Recognition
He has been awarded by Jiyo dil Se award season IV by 94.3 my FM.
He is a National Winner of Quest For excellence 2013 by Power HR forum.
He has been awarded Maviyata Puruskar Two times by NTPC Management.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu