A case story from Navya Disha’s Yuva Chavadi programme, Brahmasandra, Tumakuru, Karnataka
The exam writing pads cost almost nothing. So did the Reynolds pens and the plastic scales. Satish bought them from his salary. They were for the 35 students at the Government High School in Brahmasandra who were going to write their SSLC examinations – their 10th boards.
Something like this had never been done before. The school existed. The students existed. The examinations existed. What had not existed, until Satish created it, was someone in the village who treated a child’s preparation for those examinations as a collective concern.
The Shape of the Problem
Brahmasandra is a small farming settlement in Kallambella Hobli, Sira Taluk, in Tumakuru district. Like most villages of its kind, it is not obviously broken. Children go to school. Families tend their land. Life continues.
What it lacks, and what is harder to see than what’s present, is the infrastructure for potential. There are no organised sports programmes. No systematic support for students who are good at something and want to go to the next level.
This neglect is not any one person’s fault. It is the accumulated shape of what rural communities inherit when larger systems like education departments, sports bodies, and local governance spread their attention thinly.
Navya Disha has been working in this geography for nearly two decades. Established in 2005 as a public charitable trust and headquartered in Bengaluru, the organisation spent its first years on water safety, sanitation, and basic education across Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu.
In recent years, it has shifted its focus toward youth development, recognising that the gap between schooling and a livelihood is one of the most consequential spaces it can work in.
That shift brought it to Tumakuru, and specifically to Sira Taluk, where its Sushikshana programme now runs in 16 government high schools, building life skills, health awareness, and an early entrepreneurial mindset in students from 8th to 10th standard. The Government High School in Brahmasandra, where Satish would later support 35 students through their SSLC examinations, sits within this same network.
For youth who have moved past school, Navya Disha runs Yuva Chavadi, a programme specifically designed for young people between 15 and 29 in rural and peri-urban Tumakuru. When programme staff ask them what they want, the answer is consistent: a good job, stability, a quality life. The aspiration is not unusual. What is unusual is how little of the surrounding environment is designed to help them get there.
Satish grew up in this environment. He knows, from close range, what it looks like when a child has talent, the thirst for learning and ambition, but with nowhere to take it.
What He Built, and What It Cost Him
Yuva Chavadi’s design is built around a specific premise: that civic duty and leadership are not an inherent trait that some young people have, and others don’t; it’s a capacity that can be developed with the right conditions.
The programme places youth in structured environments, leadership workshops, civic engagement training, Gram Sabha participation, exposure visits to governance institutions; and then expects them to act on what they’ve learned within their own communities. Founding a youth association, identifying a local problem, organising a response: these are not happy accidents from the programme’s perspective. They are the intended outcome.
Satish came through this process and, in it, encountered a frame for thinking about leadership not as something one waits to receive but as something one assembles from available materials. He mobilised local youth and founded the Samriddhi Yuvajana Sangha (Samriddhi Youth Association). Satish took on the role of organiser for a community that had not had one in this particular form before.
What followed was neither dramatic nor instant. He organised sports training for children. He bought uniforms for the children from Brahmasandra so they could show up at competitions looking like they belonged there. He organised school-level talent competitions with small prizes: pens, notebooks, things that cost little but signalled care. And he worked with 35 students preparing for their SSLC examinations, offering writing materials and, more crucially, the consistent presence of someone who expected them to show up and try.
Some of these students reached state-level sports competitions. That sentence is worth reading carefully, because in rural Karnataka, it is not a small thing. It means a child from a farming village in Sira Taluk stood in a competition alongside children from urban schools with coaching staff and facilities. It means the gap between Brahmasandra and that arena was briefly closed.
But it also raises a question the available record does not answer: what happened after? A child returns from a state-level competition to the same village, the same school, the same future that was waiting before they left. What did the competition give them? Confidence? Perhaps, a sense of their own scale…
Whether the systems around them are now equipped to do anything with that confidence is a different matter.
The Ecosystem Satish Is Working Within and Against
Yuva Chavadi operates on a hub-and-spoke model. At the centre is a Youth Resource Hub in Kallambella, a physical space offering structured training in life skills, digital literacy, financial literacy, spoken English, health awareness, and career guidance. Radiating outward from that hub are 30 Youth and Teen Clubs distributed across Gram Panchayats in Tumakuru district, each functioning as a local node where young people between 15 and 29 can gather, learn, and organise. To date, the programme has reached over 2,800 youth through its activities, with around 800 formally enrolled. It works in partnership with NIMHANS for mental health and addiction prevention training, with Samvada for mentoring and youth development, and with Gram Panchayats for access to civic spaces and local governance forums.
The programme is also part of a broader continuum that Navya Disha has designed to support young people’s development. Sushikshana reaches children in government high schools before they reach Yuva Chavadi, planting the foundations of life skills and entrepreneurship awareness early. Yuva Chetana works with college students on career preparedness and employability. And Yuva Udyami, the entrepreneurship programme, provides a structured pathway for youth who want to build a livelihood of their own. The idea behind the continuum is that a young person should be able to move from one programme to the next without falling through the gaps from the classroom to the community to a livelihood with proper support at each stage.
Satish is one outcome of this design. But he is also a reminder of its limits. The programme can train a young person to see problems and take initiative. It cannot fund a permanent sports infrastructure in Brahmasandra. It cannot guarantee that the 35 students who appeared for their SSLC exams with Satish’s writing pads will find their way to opportunities that match their effort. And it cannot change, by itself, what a small farming village in Sira Taluk structurally offers the young people who grow up in it.
The programme’s own staff are clear-eyed about this. Navya Disha works with roughly 8 full-time staff and 14 part-time consultants across its Tumakuru operations; a lean team managing a continuum that reaches thousands of young people. The monitoring and learning systems are in place: baseline and endline assessments, youth leader logs, monthly reviews. But the questions that matter most – whether a child who reached state-level competition found a path forward, whether the Samriddhi Sangha sustains itself beyond Satish’s personal energy and resources are not questions any programme, however well-designed, can fully answer for a community.
What Satish has created is real, and it runs, in part, on his own resources. That is both the strength of it and the fragility. Community associations built on individual commitment tend to grow or contract with that individual’s capacity and circumstances. What happens to Samriddhi Yuvajana Sangha when Satish is older, or occupied with his own livelihood, or simply tired?
This is not a criticism of what he has done. It is the honest shape of the problem he is working inside. Individual initiative within systems that haven’t changed yet is still individual initiative within systems that haven’t changed.
What a Village Does With a Child Who Is Good at Something
The original question is still open. Rural communities across Karnataka are full of children who are quick, determined, creative, capable of more than the environment immediately around them offers. What happens to them depends on a combination of factors that no single programme controls: whether a school has space for something beyond academic performance, whether a family can absorb the cost and disruption of developing a talent, whether a local leader, a Satish, shows up at the right moment with the right attention.
When these things align, something moves. Children stand in state competitions with uniforms that fit. Students sit for exams with new materials in their hands. A youth association exists that didn’t exist before.
When they don’t align, the talent disperses quietly. No one marks its absence.
Satish’s work in Brahmasandra is not a solution to this. It is a demonstration that someone here is paying attention and a question directed outward, at the systems that should be paying attention too, about whether that is enough.