Who does Eka serve? The missed-out middle. 

Across India, lakhs of bright, driven children sit in a quiet crisis. They clear every bar of potential, yet have none of the scaffolding to convert it into a future. They work hard, hope, and go unnoticed.
 

A longitudinal study tracking 12,000 children found that a poor Indian child scoring in the top 20% at age 12 ends up, by age 22, exactly where a wealthy child scoring in the bottom 20% ends up. The difference is not ability. It is everything around ability: exposure, networks, English, guidance, and someone in their corner at every fork in the road.

We call this group the missed-out middle: under-served students with the ability and the drive, lacking the networks, guidance, or resources to convert their potential into a career. Our goal is for them to achieve economic mobility in one generation, not seven.

​

The barriers that compound

The hurdles are multiple:

- Societal bias steers under-privileged children toward easier paths to lesser goals; low-mobility vocational options such as carpentry or data entry, rather than education-led routes with higher long-term returns.

- Only 42% of 14–18 year olds can both read and understand basic English sentences, while in India's formal economy almost all professional work happens in English. 

- Most social interventions are time-bound and curriculum-contained. They are structured around programme schedules, not around when children actually need them.

- Most under-served children have no 'phone a friend', even as research identifies economic connectedness as one of the strongest predictors of upward mobility. 
 

These barriers interact and compound. A child who cannot speak English cannot access the career information that exists in English. A child with no professional network cannot learn what those careers involve. A child whose aspirations are narrow never identifies what she might prepare for. And a child who hits a crisis with no sustained relationship to fall back on is very likely to fall out of the system at precisely the moment it matters most.​

​

Why 8 years?

As Pratham's research shows, short-term interventions help but their impact fades within a year. 
 

Success requires sustained support to help students make informed decisions, a framework to develop both cognitively and non-cognitively, social capital to break the ceiling, and mentorship to power through it. And it requires supporting not just the child, but their family as well.

So we stay eight years with every Fellow; long enough to build that machinery with them, from Grade 9 through their first job. This helps them learn about themselves, stay curious about the world, and build the capacity to thrive emotionally.

​

Who we select

Selection is a decision that demands real deliberation: every child who joins the programme means another who has to stay out. Drawing on our experience working with children from under-served backgrounds, we screen against a specific set of parameters.

​

Many young people have never had the chance to build a 'profile' at all, and many children with real spark are shy and go unnoticed at school. So we are not looking for students who have already bloomed. We are looking for those who, given the right ecosystem, would run with it; students eager to co-design a journey with us and accelerate their career and life outcomes.

​

The Eka Fellowship selects students from government and low-income private schools in Pune and Bangalore.

​​​

How we walk the distance

Ours is a longitudinal programme: eight years of support, without a direct scholarship.
 

Four streams run through everything we do, woven into one another, each changing shape year by year. Fellows navigate these together, growing up in deliberately diverse cohorts across caste, religion, and gender, learning as much from each other as they do from us.

Career Pathways: Helping Fellows see a future before they're asked to choose one. We go wide first — conversations with professionals across 15+ fields, hands-on activities that surface each Fellow's strengths and interests, and explorations of their values and beliefs. Then we go deep: a personalised pathway for every Fellow, built on what they've discovered about themselves. When the big forks arrive, (stream, college and career) our Fellows choose from self-knowledge, not hearsay or default pathways.

Academic Support: We vary study skills, exam-taking skills, and academic support for each Fellow, peaking at the key transitions such as Grade 10 to 11 and Grade 12 to degree college. We cover exam-preparation strategies and bolster school instruction.
 

Life Mastery: The quieter half of mobility. Through theatre, mindfulness, and sports, Fellows learn to speak with confidence, express themselves, and handle setbacks. What begins as resilience and self-expression at 14 becomes workplace readiness, emotional intelligence, and professional networks at 21.

Financial Capacity: Equipping Fellows with the knowledge and resources to navigate higher-education financing. We partner with scholarship-granting organisations and other resources, ensuring Fellows are prepared to overcome financial barriers and pursue their educational goals.

​