Mr.INDIA In Real Life :Vinayak Lohani
Starting from 3 resident children in 2003, today Parivaar is a home for more than 700 destitute children. Parivaar helps rehabilitate orphans, street children and children of sex workers in and around Kolkata. It has children from West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand. One may wonder, what moved Vinayak to give up a glittering career for social service. Sounding it too natural, Vinayak says, “I never felt at home in the IIM ambience. Something was lacking. I could visualise my career 25-30 years on. I realised it would be a lifetime of counting how many chocolates, radios or soaps I have sold; how much business I’ve secured; manipulating compromising and planning strategies. This was not for me.”

Today, Parivaar is considered to be a model institution for caretaking and overall development of children from destitute backgrounds in a residential setting. Additionally, Parivaar’s day education initiatives cover more than 3000 students in far-flung tribal areas in West Bengal and Jharkhand and provide a plethora of services to the local communities. In 2011, Parivaar started the separate girls’ residential campusParivaar Sarada Teertha with a capacity to accommodate 500 resident girls. Like theParivaar Ashram (Boys’ Residential Campus) Parivaar Sarada Teertha also has its own library, play areas, dining halls, cultural halls, prayer halls and after school programs.

Parivaar’s website says “A lot of people used to advise us not to scale up in girls’ residential caretaking domain, as it is quite challenging and generally undertaken by all-women’s organisations or organisations founded by women social entrepreneurs, but we never toned down our vision and goals.”

Parivaar’s own quality Formal School Amar Bharat Vidyapeeth continues to attend to formal education of all the resident children, i.e. from boys’ as well as girls’ campuses.