A Second Chance: How Poonam Reclaimed Her Dream of Education

For nearly a year, a small bench outside her house was the closest Poonam Verma came to a classroom. Every morning, she sat there and watched other children walk past on their way to school. Then she would get up, go inside, and return to the chores and fieldwork that had quietly become her whole world. She was seventeen. She had failed her Class 10 examination. And in her mind, that single result had already decided the rest of her life.

Poonam belongs to a financially vulnerable family in Sirri village. Her father, Harichand Verma, and mother, Nirmala Verma, depend on daily wage labour, and their income was often too uncertain to plan around, let alone stretch across two children’s education. Her younger brother, Badal Verma, twelve, was still in Class 8. Poonam had always been an average student, nothing more, nothing less, but failing felt different. It felt final. She was afraid that if she went back, classmates and neighbours would laugh at her for repeating a class she had already sat through once. So, she stopped imagining a future for herself. She told herself that farming, housework, and seasonal labour were simply what came next.

That quiet resignation might have become permanent, if not for a visit on 12 December 2025. Bhuwaneshwari Sahu, an Academic Mentor with the Khushaal Bachpan Programme, supported by Caritas Australia, was going door to door in Sirri village, checking on children’s school attendance, when she found Poonam sitting outside her home in the middle of a school day. It didn’t take long, talking with her, to understand that the real obstacle wasn’t Poonam’s ability. It was fear, and financial hardship, and a seventeen-year-old who had quietly decided she wasn’t worth investing in anymore.

Bhuwaneshwari Sahu didn’t leave it at one visit. She returned with Sarita Madhukar, Community Educator, and on 16 December 2025 the two of them sat with Poonam again, not to lecture her, but to talk. They told her that one failed exam does not measure a person’s worth or foreclose their future. They told her about Open School, a path she hadn’t known existed.

“After failing, I thought my studies were over,” Poonam later recalled. “I was afraid that people would laugh at me if I returned to school. The repeated encouragement from the Khushaal Bachpan team slowly gave me the confidence to believe that I could start again.”

Her parents needed convincing too, not because they didn’t want better for her, but because they were carrying enough already. “There were days when arranging daily household expenses itself was difficult,” her father said. “We were worried about how we would manage her education, but we also knew that without education her future would become even more difficult.” Her mother remembered how far Poonam had withdrawn: “She rarely spoke about her future anymore. When the Khushaal Bachpan team kept encouraging her, we realised that she deserved another opportunity.”

With her family’s support, Poonam was enrolled in Open School on 14 January 2026 and began attending the village Learning Centre for an hour each day, where Bhuwaneshwari Sahu guided her through revision and exam preparation. “Poonam did not need extraordinary support,” Bhuwaneshwari said. “She needed someone to believe that she was capable of learning again.”

She cleared her model examinations, sat for her Open Board exams between 1 March and 30 March 2026, and passed with Second Division. She is now in Class 11, Arts stream, at the Government Higher Secondary School.

The bench outside her house is still there. But Poonam doesn’t sit on it and watch anymore. She walks past it every morning, books in hand, on her way to the future she had once quietly given up on.

“I will complete my education,” she says now, “no matter how many struggles I have to face.”