Till she was cast in the lead role of a film on child marriage, 14-year-old Neelam from Jamiyatpur village in Uttar Pradesh was quite resigned to being married off by her parents. But acting in the movie gave her the courage to speak up and her wedding was called off.

Women in Uttar Pradesh are earning their livelihoods by collecting bills, running restaurants, making incense cones, and stitching sanitary pads. The self help group women are being trained under the Uttar Pradesh State Rural Livelihood Mission.

Neetu Thakur, a teacher from the Government Primary School in Jhumarkhali, Khargone district, Madhya Pradesh, is sharing her experiences in her teacher's diary. She writes about how a children with an intense disliking for school gradually outshined all his classmates.

Reena Srivastava, born in the small village Dariha Mohalla in Basti District of Uttar Pradesh, teaches mathematics as a lecturer at B.N. Inter College, Akbarpur, Ambedkar Nagar, Uttar Pradesh since 2021. Here is her account of how she became a lecturer.

Neetu Singh recalls her difficult 20-year-old journey as a teacher since she came to Bharthua village in Aligarh, UP, as a young bride. From teaching 115 children single handedly to stitching together cement bags to use as durries in the classroom, she is struggling to keep alive a legacy of her father-in-law who set up Jaybal Vidyalaya in 1995 in Bharthua village that had no school before that.

A paint manufacturing workshop operated by 20 women in Unnao, Uttar Pradesh has so far sold 1,200 kilogrammes of paint made from cow dung. For the women the enterprise has raised their self esteem and given them economic independence.

A school in Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur actively scouts around nearby villages to bring children from poor families to school. It also has an active NCC wing.