“In 1998, I arrived in India to find the answer to a question my student asked me back home: ‘How do children in India go to school?’ I realised I didn’t know because I had never visited India,” she recalls.

The answer, she found, was a mosaic, much like the landscape of India. There was a school in the middle of a lake, another inside a temple and yet another in a tent in a desert. There were also schools that operated in the dark and those that were run from railway platforms. And in all these, Heydlauff found much to celebrate.

“These schools were stories in themselves, stories that needed to be told,” she says. That was the genesis of her book Going To School In India, which was published by Penguin in 2004 and which will be reprinted by Random House in June. “But there was a lot more that needed to be done. I wanted to make education a fun thing. There was much to despair of but there were also a lot of good things happening in these schools and there was no way to talk about it to other children,” she says. Her organisation, Going to School, was born with this aim and in its four years has highlighted the multihued education system in India through colourful booklets, films and radio series. “We brought out 10 mini books in regional languages and supported by BHP Billiton. So, children who studied on a mountaintop school in Ladakh were reading about children just like themselves who were going to school on wheelchairs. Half-a-million copies of the booklets went out to schools in Orissa alone,” she says. The 10 mini films on the subject were telecast on Pogo and National Geographic.

As this project neared completion, Heydlauff’s small team of young enthusiasts were working on another major problem—the high dropout rate among girls in government schools in North India. The staff travelled through Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh—searching for women achievers who had beaten the odds. This was ‘Project Girl Stars’, supported by Unicef. The organisation told their inspirational tales through another series of books, films and radio series besides making it the subject of their 2007 calendar. Among the ‘Girl Stars’ is Bhanwari Malawat from Bikaner who was married off as a child but insisted on continuing her school. At 24, she is now a police constable. “Another inspirational story is that of Tehseen Bano, a hostel warden. Just to go to school, Tehseen had to argue and convince her relatives and taught other children to pay her school fees. When our books and films reached her district, many girls told her they, too, wanted to study,” says Heydlauff.

Among all these Girl Stars, Heydlauff’s favourite seems to be Anita Kumari from Muzzafarpur in Bihar. When Anita’s parents clamped down on her going to school, she started beekeeping to pay for her education. “She started with two queen bees and today has 100 boxes of bees. Now 17 years old, Anita studies English Literature,” Heydlauff says proudly, adding that Anita’s zeal was the inspiration behind Going to School’s next campaign Be—inspiring students between 10 and 17 from underprivileged backgrounds to become entrepreneurs. “Excitingly, ‘Be’ has an Entrepreneurial Fund to invest in new businesses created by young people,” says Heydlauff. “In 2020, there will be over 210 million unemployed people and 50 per cent will be below 30.”