Supporting a home and school near Pune for children who have lost a parent.
In 2015 he was a software engineer in Pune — Wipro, then Infosys. There was a suicide in his village, the first he had seen from close up. He went home for Diwali, saw children whose schooling was about to stop, and resigned.
Snehwan is what he built: a home and school at Alandi, near Pune, for children who have lost a parent to farmer suicide. He and his wife Archana have run it for ten years.
Not as a project or an exercise. These are standing responsibilities, held every day by children who arrived at Snehwan having lost a parent.
The land given to Snehwan in 2019 was thorn scrub with no house for two kilometres. There was no milk, so a cowshed began with a single cow. There was no gas, and the cylinder men would not drive out that far, so they built gobar gas from cow dung and biogas from kitchen waste — now cooking for a hundred people, run by ninth-standard children who can explain the digestion process.
There was no power, so solar: ten kilowatts, then twenty, now seventy. There was no water, so rainwater harvesting, with five lakh litres in storage. They named the place Dnyangram, the village of knowledge.
Child, do not be afraid. I have great faith in you.What Ashok says to every child at Snehwan
We are in the process of establishing Snehwan USA as a nonprofit corporation, and an employer identification number is being obtained so that donations from the United States can be received as tax-deductible contributions under section 501(c)(3).
This page will be updated when that is in place. If you would like to be told when it is, or if you would like to give in the meantime, write to info@snehwanusa.org.
Ashok gave a ninety-minute interview in Marathi on the Atmaudyog channel. It is the fullest account of how Snehwan works and why he built it that way.