• “No one has ever become poor by giving.” Anne Frank

What is Aseema?

Friends of Aseema was established to support the Aseema Charitable Trust. Aseema, which means “limitless” in Sanskrit, has been working since 1995 to educate children living in extreme poverty in the streets and slums of Mumbai, India.

Mumbai Work

From its humble beginnings, with its first class of children gathered in a room borrowed from a private school in 1997, Aseema has grown into an organization that has earned so much faith from the Mumbai governing authorities that is has been entrusted year after year to fully manage three of Mumbai’s public schools (known as “municipal schools” in India).  These schools – Pali-Chimbai, Santacruz (W) and Kherwadi – serve some of the most economically and otherwise marginalized children in the city.

For more than 20 years, Aseema has grown along with the children served by anticipating and responding to their needs and providing program and educational support to give these young ones what they need to thrive and succeed. Aseema generally follows the Montessori child-centered methods and provides children with activity-based learning and additional help such as nutritional support and remedial programs.

Aseema inspires and enlists the children’s families in the effort, raising consciousness among them, many of whom have never gone to school themselves. Aseema’s social workers perform a complete psychosocial history on each child to make sure the child’s emotional and physical needs are met and do not stand in the way of learning. In these ways, Aseema not only recognizes each child’s potential as limitless, but reaches out with limitless love and commitment. And it works.

Although when the school day ends, these children go home (if they have one) to slum communities without proper running water or electricity or space or hygienic facilities, they go home with minds full of curiosity and a desire for learning and the knowledge that they are valued in the world. After completing school, children in India take an exam known as the S.S.C. This is a tremendous source of stress and competition for Indian students, and it is no simple test. Aseema’s children are outscoring their counterparts from private and other public schools.

From its first class of 18 children, Aseema now impacts the lives of 4,400 children every year.  Aseema enrolls 2,700 children in its own schools, serves hundreds of others with its supportive programs and provides much-needed teacher training in Kanpur, India, to the Amin Welfare Trust.

Humble Beginnings

When it began, Aseema had almost no funding. Nothing was easy. In 1997, Aseema’s first class of children met in a borrowed room from St. Stanislaus High School in Mumbai. Even this came as a “huge relief” to Dilbur Parakh because had personally gone from school to school asking for a room to use.

Finding New Frontiers – Tribal Education

Aseema provides training to teachers in other poverty-stricken communities and recently completed a multi-year project whose success once seemed unimaginable. In researching possibilities for a residential facility outside of Mumbai, Aseema’s chairperson Dilbur Parakh traveled to Igatpuri, a town northeast of Mumbai. Igatpuri is surrounded by tribal villages. In India, tribal people are the original inhabitants, much like the Native Americans in the United States. Their condition is generally worse and even more marginalized than other disadvantaged Indians. When the chairperson saw the searing needs of the tribal communities surrounding Igatpuri, Aseema undertook to raise funds and ultimately build a beautiful new school for the children there. Construction remained underway despite challenges from weather and terrain and lack of water and electricity. The school has been in operation as construction progressed, but the facility itself was finally completed and inaugurated in December of 2018.

The first four tribal children graduated and took their exams in June of 2019.

All four passed.

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