I got them books and uniforms and they would come home to eat and then go to school. Of course, within a week, two had run off.

As a child, her parents could not afford to send her to school. Today, Mumbai-based Jyoti Tanna, founder, the Each One Teach One Charitable Foundation, is a fairy godmother to the thousands of children she has helped empower with knowledge and education. Jayashree Menon spends time with the committed lady who has battled bureaucratic skirmishes and abusive fathers to fulfil her dream of spreading literacy

It was the impoverished aftermath of the Partition and, much later, a chance encounter with five urchins at a street signal that were the catalysts for Jyoti Tanna starting the Each One Teach One Charitable Foundation.

First, let's take the Partition. Her parents fled from Hyderabad, Sind, with their nine children to begin a new life in Mumbai. "Riches to rags - that's what it was," Tanna remembers. For the eight-year-old girl, it was traumatic, to say the least. "We led a hand to mouth existence and even one meal a day was hard to come by."

The older siblings somehow managed to complete their education, but schooling for the youngest child was the last thing on anybody's mind.

Burying her bitterness and her dreams, she got down to the business of earning a living. At work, she met a young man, Narottam Tanna, fell in love and got married. Life slowly started looking up. Even as she became the mother of two sons, Ashok and Ajay, she continued working in the administration section, Mazgaon Docks.

Then, one day, while driving home, she saw five urchins playing cards near a traffic signal. "On a sudden impulse, I parked the car and started talking to them," she says. She asked them why they were not in school. One of them replied insolently, 'Kya pharak padta hai?' (What difference does it make?) Tanna started probing and discovered that their fathers would beat them if they saw them at home and the teachers would beat them in school because they did not have books or uniforms. But suppose, she asked them, they were given books, uniforms and something to eat, would they then stop playing cards and go to school? All five nodded eagerly.

"Each One Teach One (EOTO) was inspired by a simple idea - I teach you, you teach someone else - and was registered as a trust in 1984," she says.

Anil Wagmare, one of our ex-students is now a SAP System Administrator in the USA and sends us 25,000 dollars every year, while another ex-student, Deepak Nagwanshi, is working full time with us as a computer teacher," she says proudly. "So many of our students have done well; in fact, of the original five, one is a lawyer and one an accountant."