International Day of the Girl Child (October 11)
Jamshedpur: 47 students from Masti Ki Pathshala (MKP), enabled by Tata Steel Foundation, appeared for their matriculation examination in 2025. Of the entire batch, three girls – Amrita, Rekha and Smriti (names changed) – ranked highest, with Amrita, Rekha getting above 80 per cent and Smriti scoring slightly lesser at 79 per cent. But their story is not about the marks but the journey itself, which started from the streets of Jamshedpur.
While Amrita and Rekha picked up odd jobs like slag picking, given the abject poverty they lived in. Smriti on the other hand, lost her parents and lived with her elder sister, collecting plastic bottles and surviving all the odds life threw at them. Education was not even a part of their daily lives, where they were too busy to get two square meals for themselves and their families. Smriti even mopped floors at malls to get food for herself and her sister.
When the Masti ki Pathshala team went to survey, they identified Rekha, Smriti and Amrita and spoke to them about the possibilities of choosing education as an alternate. After several rounds of counselling, discussing the opportunities, the life they were about to choose, all three of them finally decided to join Masti ki Pathshala. They started with the bridging course and were soon enrolled in mainstream schools to pursue education as their pathway to progress. While they struggled initially, Rekha, Amrita and Smriti eventually picked up and slowly started shining in their academic journey.
As they passed matriculation with flying colours, all three of them were determined to leverage education and make a career. Now, months after their first milestone of matriculation, Amrita is enrolled in Industrial Training Institute, Chandil, in CNC course. Rekha is studying at Tata Steel Technical Institute, Burmamines, pursuing a course in electrical trade. And, Smriti is continuing her studies with science as her major subject to build a career of her dreams. This is the beginning of turning their fate around and making it big in the world.
Masti ki Pathshala is a flagship programme of Tata Steel Foundation, which started ten years ago to bring back out-of-school children back to school, to encourage them to leverage the perks of education. In 2024, the first batch of MKP passed their matriculation and 10 of them are already working their dream jobs in Tata Marcopolo, Dharwad, Karnataka. It was a major milestone as kids who are part of MKP never received formal or elementary education and had to learn everything from scratch once they joined the bridge course. The programme has consistently reached out to encourage children from the streets of Jamshedpur to join school and change their fate around, bringing them out of worst forms of labour. In that regard, Masti Ki Pathshala has so far enabled child labour free zones in 25 out of 139 bastis in Jamshedpur.
