The Shanti Bhavan Children's Project was founded in 1997 with the mission of breaking the destructive cycle of poverty through high quality education. Shanti Bhavan is a modern, hygienic, co-ed residential school that focuses on early intervention and in-depth, progressive schooling from age 4-18.

The project serve the children of the poorest of the poor--the so called "untouchables" or dalits--those forgotten or ignored by the rest of society, who are destined to become rag-pickers, quarry laborers, or sex-workers, if not for the program's intervention. All of their children come from families that make less than $1 a day, and often they come from one-parent households.