Project Yaadhum began with something we kept watching happen and could not explain: two equally capable students, the same school, entirely different futures. Nobody could tell us why. So we went to find out properly.
Our mission
Every year, families choose a stream in a matter of weeks, on marks, hope and whatever information happened to reach them. We are building the first honest record of that process, school by school, and using it to make the next decision a little better informed than the last.
Our vision
A Tamil line two thousand years old says every town is our own and every person our kin. We took it as a premise rather than a slogan. If that is true, then the district a child grows up in should not quietly decide which doors are open to them, and that is a claim you can go and check.
Three things we hold to. Each one is a claim about the world rather than a value on a wall, which means fieldwork can confirm it or prove us wrong.
The claim
A student’s possibilities should not depend on which district, which school, or which family happened to raise them.
The blind spot
That quiet arithmetic is deciding futures every year, and it has never been looked at honestly.
The choice
We would rather spend a year finding out how it truly works than a week assuming we already know.
We have spent our working lives on either side of this question: in schools and student mentoring, and in strategy consulting and technology.
We mentor school and college students through Naan Mudhalvan, the Ministry of Education’s Vidyanjali programme, and as education volunteers with the United Nations, work that puts us in exactly the rooms this research is about.
Our own notes are below, in our own words.
These are the volunteer mentoring roles our own team holds. The organisations above are not affiliated with Project Yaadhum and do not endorse, certify or accredit this work.
Komala MaranFounder
Not every child has a Maran. My father’s name is Maran. I got into IIIT Allahabad and my brother into IIT Delhi. Neither happened because the path was obvious. It happened because my father found someone who knew the path existed.
When I was in school, I did not know what JEE was. I did not know which colleges existed or what the examination required.
Then one evening he heard, at a friend’s house, that their son had entered an NIT after studying at a coaching institute in Andhra Pradesh. He did not simply tell me. He went. He asked. He understood the system, and he moved me there for Classes 11 and 12.
That was when I first learnt what JEE was.
Ten years of schooling, and I had never heard of the examination that would decide where I could go.
What stays with me is not that it worked. It is how easily it could not have. My father happened to be in that room. He happened to ask.
The information existed the whole time. It simply never had a path to reach me.
This is true of far more than examinations.
A child spends years in a school where people notice things. Unusual curiosity. A way of thinking that stands out. A difficulty that keeps returning. Those observations stay in a teacher’s memory, or a passing conversation at a parent meeting, and rarely become anything that helps the child later.
Nobody failed. The system was never built to carry that knowledge forward.
Talent has a way of announcing itself. Information does not. Somebody has to carry it.
That is what Project Yaadhum exists to work on. Not a label, not a prediction. An understanding, arriving before the decision does.
We are starting with Class 9, working with schools to bring together what is already known about a student and turn it into something useful before the next transition arrives.
Because the question should not only be what marks did this child get. It should also be what should happen next.
We are starting in Krishnagiri, one school at a time, asking what a school already knows about a child and what happens to it. My father found that path for two children by asking the right person, once, by chance. It should not take luck, and it should not take a Maran.
Komala Maran Founder, Project Yaadhum · IIIT Allahabad · Seven years in strategy consulting · Mentors students through Naan Mudhalvan and the Ministry of Education’s Vidyanjali programme
Abisho GeorgeFounding Member
My parents gave me two things: trust, and the freedom to use it. Every decision I made, they backed completely, and I spent years making sure I never gave them a reason to regret it.
But trust is not direction. When I had to pick a stream after Class 10, I did not choose the one I wanted. I chose the one that closed the fewest doors, because I did not know which door I would eventually need.
I found out much later that I was good at mathematics. Solving problems never tired me the way everything else did. By the time I was certain of it, my board exams were behind me, and when I looked up the country’s best institute for what I finally wanted to study, the application window had already closed.
I did not lose that seat on merit. I lost it on a date I did not know existed.
Ask a Class 10 student what they are good at. Then ask them what that could become, and by when they would have to act on it. The gap between those two answers is the one I have never stopped thinking about.
It is not made of careless people. Teachers know who is quick with numbers and who comes alive in a language class. But that knowledge tends to stay where it forms, in a staff room, in a passing remark to a parent, and the decision arrives anyway, on a date nobody circled.
Ability is distributed far more evenly than information is.
Project Yaadhum is not starting with an answer to that. We are going school by school to understand how these decisions get made today: what reaches a family, and when. What we want to fix is the timing. The knowledge is already in the building. It arrives too late, or it does not arrive at all.
I am often asked whether I would change any of it. I would not. That path is why I recognise this problem on sight, and why I will not leave it alone. I cannot go back for myself. I can make sure it reaches the student sitting where I sat.
Abisho George Founding Member, Project Yaadhum · Mentors students through Naan Mudhalvan and the Ministry of Education’s Vidyanjali programme