From a Delhi slum to the UN: How Devendra Kumar's Ladli Foundation is changing 30 lakh lives

Not many people can say they learned to survive before they learned to walk. Devendra Kumar can. Abandoned by his parents in Dakshinpuri, one of Delhi's most crime-prone slum clusters, at the age of two, with a three-day-old sister in his lap, he was selling balloons on the street by the time he was eight. He dodged drug rackets, took beatings he still remembers in detail, and somehow kept going.

Today, that same boy runs Ladli Foundation, a grassroots organisation that has, by its own count, touched the lives of more than 30 lakh women and children across India. Sitting down with YourStory, The Bharat Project founder and CEO Shradha Sharma on the platform's podcast, Kumar opened up about the life that built him, and the movement he has built in return.

"Even today, I wonder how that child survived," he tells Shradha, almost as if speaking about someone else. "That struggle should remain alive. The day I forget it is the day I lose my way."

From Dakshinpuri to a national movement

Ladli Foundation was set up in 2012 and today works across roughly 50 districts in 10 to 12 states, according to information available on its public platforms. In 2020, it was granted Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and it has also been conferred with a National Award by the Government of India. The work spans girl-child protection, healthcare, education, skilling and gender sensitisation, all aimed at communities the formal development sector often struggles to reach.

Kumar's early years, in many ways, wrote the foundation's playbook. He speaks candidly about how organised crime networks in slums target children first, pulling them into inhalant addictions and prescription-drug abuse before drawing them into petty crime. His own escape, he says, came from an unlikely place: volunteering with the Delhi Police as a teenager. "Once the boys saw I knew the police, they stopped coming after me," he recalls. That accidental shield became his calling. Volunteering, he says, is the single biggest reason he is where he is today.

The ideas that grew out of a childhood

Some of Ladli's most talked-about interventions come straight from scars Kumar still carries. The Run for Laadli half marathon, organised with Delhi Police, in 2017 drew a reported gathering of around 25,000 men at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi to rally for women's safety, an event Kumar says was deliberately designed around male participation.

Then there is the quiet, harder work. Ladli has helped organise community marriages for around 2,100 girls from low-income families, insisting on police background checks of grooms and sending brides off with health insurance cover. "In India, when a new bride falls sick in her first year, the family says she brought the illness with her," Kumar says. "We wanted to close that gap before it even opened."

His most creative idea, though, may be the foundation's sustainable Kanya Pujan initiative, launched on 10 August 2019. Instead of handing out Rs 5 and a plate of food to young girls during Navratri and forgetting them by evening, Ladli asks families to commit to one girl child for nine consecutive years, covering her school fees, health check-ups and nutrition. Some families, he says, have gone on to treat these girls almost like their own daughters.

Why he keeps telling people not to send money

One of the most striking parts of the conversation is Kumar's pushback against India's donation culture. "We encourage people to contribute through their efforts rather than their money," he tells Shradha. He is not dismissing funding. He is arguing that it is not enough.

His pitch is simple: every household in India should produce at least one trained volunteer who knows how to run a baseline survey, do a needs assessment or measure impact. In a country where the Companies Act, 2013 made CSR spending mandatory for eligible firms, a citizen-led volunteer base, he believes, would sharply raise the value of every rupee the corporate sector already puts in.

Ladli has tested this thinking on the ground through partnerships with USAID and state governments on routine immunisation, COVID-19 vaccination drives and tuberculosis elimination, along with school-level gender sensitisation sessions run with local police to tackle harassment outside girls' schools.

What comes next

As India's development agenda increasingly tracks SDG targets on gender equality and health, Ladli Foundation's grassroots-first model is starting to draw attention from other NGOs and global development bodies. Reports suggest the organisation is now working towards General Consultative Status at the UN and planning deeper expansion into markets like the US, Europe and Australia.

If that happens, a movement that began with a two-year-old boy left behind in a Delhi slum could end up shaping how the world thinks about volunteering itself. And somewhere, Kumar hopes, another child in another Dakshinpuri will decide, like he did, that the way out begins with showing up for someone else first.