ADP celebrates 10 years supporting Indian charity Marudyan

ADP is celebrating 10 years since founding Marudyan UK, our partner charity in India which provides support for children living below the poverty line. Marudyan UK was set up to allow ADP to provide ongoing funding for the work of Calcutta Marudyan and the Marudyan Society, two arms of a charity founded by John Beentjes in 1998.

Marudyan was originally a response to seeing the horrendous conditions in the back area of Devilal Colony, an area of Gurgaon in New Delhi. Many Devilal families sustain themselves by “rag-picking” – collecting and selling waste from the city’s rubbish dumps. ADP established contact with Marudyan at around the same time as we opened our Delhi NCR studio in 2011.

Since ADP began supporting Marudyan in 2012, we’ve been able to support the charity’s education programmes at the Marudyan Learning Centre in New Delhi, as well as funding and designing a new hostel for children in Orissa in 2019. The hostel provides accommodation for children from the hill tribes of the Eastern Ghatt, where basic education is hard to come by. As well as educating children, Marudyan has distributed blankets, mosquito nets and food packages, provided emergency relief, and taught skills such as driving, sewing and carpentry.

To celebrate ten years of Marudyan UK, we wanted to share some of the stories of the people the charity has helped. These include “J” (names have been anonymised), who arrived at the Marudyan Learning Centre in Gurgaon badly malnourished but has become much better since receiving midday meals at the Centre. “My parents are not able to pay the school fees of the private schools,” he told us, “but in the Learning Centre I get free education. Here I can build my future, and I am very thankful for the help.”

Another student, “M”, told us: “Both my father and mother work for our living. They earn money by ironing clothes all day. But after all that, they still would not be able to pay for our education in other schools. I have two brothers and they also study with me in the Learning Centre. This helps us to make our future. And I really want to say that if this school had not given us the opportunity then we would never have had the chance to study in our lives.”

Other students include “K”, whose father suffers from drug addiction and spends whatever he earns on his addiction, leaving no money left for K’s education. “S” and “Z” are siblings, and their mother arrived at the Centre crying because she didn’t have enough food for her children. With the free meal programmes the Marudyan Charitable Society has helped thousands of children like these over the years – we’ve picked out a few key statistics to show the life-changing impact the charity’s had in some of India’s poorest communities.