Chirag Foundation & Headstrong
Chirag Foundation was founded by alumni of Headstrong — a global software services company that had, by the mid-2000s, built one of its largest teams in Noida. The trustees shared more than a work history. They shared a conviction: that the good fortune of riding India's IT boom carried with it an obligation to those left behind by it. Chirag was their answer to that obligation.
In 2008, Harsh Singh Lohit — Managing Director of Headstrong — came to Rataul for the first time, looking for a school where his colleagues could be useful. He found Salma Public School. He found Prof. Zahoor Siddiqui, a retired history professor who had sold his Delhi home to build classrooms in his ancestral village. And he found, in that first meeting, something that resisted easy explanation — the particular feeling of a place that exists entirely on account of someone's refusal to accept that it shouldn't.
What followed was not a one-off. Headstrong — through its voluntary employee trust, which was the operational face of Chirag — began supporting SPS in a sustained and structured way. The company and its employees provided annual scholarships for
students and teachers. They brought books, stationery and school bags every few months. They built toilets for girls. They installed a generator for the months when the electricity grid fails. They sent volunteers — engineers and managers — to Rataul on Saturdays to teach English, Mathematics and Science to children who were, in many cases, the first in their families to read.
When Headstrong was acquired in 2011, the offices changed. Chirag Foundation did not. The same people — now at different companies, in different cities, building different lives — continued to fund and run the programmes at SPS through the trust. This is what Chirag was always built for: to outlast any single employer and carry the commitment forward regardless of corporate circumstance.
Over fourteen years, Chirag's work at Salma Public School deepened considerably. A fully equipped ICT lab was established — fifteen laptops, a trained computer teacher, digital learning resources. A children's library was built within the classrooms so that books stayed visible and accessible, and alongside it a community library open to every resident of Rataul — because Chirag understood that the school sat inside a community, and that community mattered too. Teachers were trained through sustained partnerships with Ignus Pahal for pedagogy, EnglishHelper for spoken English, and Cinema for Resistance for visual learning. Islahi Talim — a programme of second chances for students and alumni who needed more time and attention — was initiated and kept running year after year. Classrooms were painted, infrastructure maintained, and the school's finances supplemented at moments when fees alone could not cover the costs.
Through all of this, Chirag remained what it had always been: a trust funded by individuals — former Headstrong colleagues contributing from their own pockets, long after the company that brought them together had ceased to exist. No corporate mandate. No CSR obligation. Just people who had decided, collectively, that this school was worth it.
---
There is a particular kind of generosity in not stopping. Chirag Foundation practised it, quietly, for fourteen years.