Pinky Jaiswal is ambitious. She wants to work in a bank. But there is a hurdle: she failed her tenth-grade exam when she was a teenager studying in Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. For the longest time, she thought that would be the end of her education. Now 30, she lives in Mumbai with her husband and five-year-old daughter. In June 2022, she took a bold step. She enrolled in the eighth grade in one of Mumbai’s many night schools.
“I want to study so that I can stand on my own two feet – and so that my daughter does not have to live a life like mine,” Pinky says. “My future has been ruined; hers should not be.”
