GirlKind Foundation

India's Everday Hero: Sandhya Puchalalpalli

(to the left Sandhya Puchalalpalli, photo courtesy of Kent Becker)

There are people in this world that say they would like to create change and then there are those who create change through their actions. One such woman is Sandhya Puchalalpalli who created Aarti Home in the early 1990s as a home for abandoned and unwanted baby girls. Twenty years later, she has become India’s every day hero.

I first learned about Sandhya after watching this BBC documentary, “India’s Missing Girls,” directed and produced by Ashok Prasad in 2007. Please do watch it when you can.

“I set up Aarti Home as a shelter home for abandoned young girls but our journey eventually led us to their mothers. Behind every abandoned child, we found a mother who was either unable to afford the extra cost or was unable to protect her. This made us rethink our approach. From addressing the symptoms, we began to look at solving the issues that lay beneath them,” explains Sandhya.

Sandhya’s journey that led her to create Aarti Home in 1992 began when she found an abandoned baby girl on a street in her hometown Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh.  Sandhya took the 2 ½ year old girl named Radhika home and cared for her as one of her own. 

“The moment, at which Radhika walked into my life, I decided that it was time we started an organization in order to take care of such girls. I made a few phone calls to friends and suggested we pool in money to set up a home for orphaned girls,” said Sandhya.

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