విద్యాంకురం विद्यांकुरम vidyā + aṅkura — the sprout of knowledge
A family trust in Hyderabad that pays the costs which stop a child finishing school — and publishes every rupee it moves.
In formation. The deed is with counsel in Telangana. The trust is not yet registered, holds no bank account, has accepted no donation and has funded no child.
This page is published now, empty, so that the record starts on the first day rather than the first good quarter.
Objects
The deed runs on three heads. The scope is deliberately wider than the programme: modifying a registered trust’s objects means applying for registration again, so the room had to be taken before signing rather than asked for later.
Head A
Fees, examination costs, books, uniforms, footwear, transport, boarding, devices and internet, coaching and remedial tuition — pre-primary through post-graduate, including vocational and technical training and bridge schooling for children already out of school.
Head B
Grants to registered child care institutions towards the education, nutrition, health and learning materials of the children in their care; support for children with disabilities; family strengthening where poverty alone is separating a child from home; and aftercare for young people leaving institutions at eighteen.
Head C
Sport, music, art, drama, reading, science and computing — coaching, kit, instruments, entry fees and travel. Life skills, spoken English, financial and digital literacy, mentoring. Participation over a season, not a prize day.
Selection
Every candidate is scored out of 100 on a written rubric and the sheet is kept on file — for the children chosen and for those not. A trustee related to a candidate, or employed by the institution concerned, takes no part in that decision and the abstention is minuted.
Marks carry deliberately little weight. Selecting on marks funds the children who were going to make it anyway.
Need is evidenced by an income certificate or a Food Security Card, not by testimony. Before any award the trust establishes what the state already pays — and helps the family claim it. Public schemes are free leverage, and funding what they already cover wastes the donation twice.
Disbursement
Six steps, in order, for every rupee. The sequence exists because the common failures of charitable giving in India — ghost beneficiaries, fees waived on paper, cash absorbed by a household emergency — each fail at a different one of them.
Monthly, by bank transfer, recorded in the donation register against the donor’s name, PAN and whether the gift is to corpus or general funds.
Full board, scoring sheet on file, interested trustees abstaining. A sanction letter goes to the family and the institution stating exactly what is covered and what is not.
Bank transfer to the school or vendor’s own account against an invoice. Two signatures above ₹10,000. No cash beyond a ₹2,000 petty limit, and no payment to an account that is not in the payee’s name.
Held by the trust, not by the school. A missing receipt after thirty days suspends the next payment to that institution.
Invoice, transfer confirmation, receipt, attendance extract, report card, and the child’s own quarterly note on how the term went. The next term’s payment depends on it arriving.
Date, child code, purpose, institution, amount, bank UTR, receipt number. Reconciled quarterly against the bank statement by the Treasurer.
Bound by the deed
The record
Every payment the trust has ever made, with the bank reference that proves it. Published because a trust asking for money on the strength of its diligence should be checkable on the strength of its diligence.
| Date | Child | Purpose | Paid to | Amount | Bank UTR | Receipt |
|---|
This table is generated from the trust’s bank records. It is empty because the trust has not yet made a payment.
The first entry is expected in the 2027–28 academic year. When it appears it will carry those seven fields — and so will every payment after it, for as long as the trust exists.
Limits
The transparency runs to the money, not to the children. These are commitments in the deed, not a privacy notice, and two of them are also the law.
Children appear here as codes — VKM-27-01 and so on. The code is enough to follow a rupee from a bank transfer to a receipt. It is not enough to find a child.
Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015, s.74Children do send the trust their marks, attendance and their own account of the term — that is how the trust knows whether any of this worked, and it is what releases the next payment. What gets published is what a cohort looks like, never what a named fourteen-year-old scored. A bad term should not be searchable at twenty-four.
Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, s.9A family whose school fees depend on this trust cannot freely say no to it. So the question is never asked.
Trust deed, clause 3.5(c)Not for donors, not for the trustees’ friends, not for the family that founded it. A stream of short-term visitors is not good for children who have already lost enough people.
Trust deed, clause 3.5(d)A young person over eighteen who has left institutional care is an adult and can tell their own story, in their own words, under their own name — and withdraw it at any time without giving a reason and without any effect on their support.
By written release, revocableGovernance
Three trustees, all resident in India, all serving without remuneration. They are members of one family, which is stated here because a donor is entitled to know it and to weigh it.
Papers
Published as each is finalised. The audited accounts and the annual report will be posted here within ninety days of each financial year end, as the deed requires.
Giving
The trust cannot accept a donation before it is registered and has a bank account in its own name. Nothing on this page is a solicitation, and there is deliberately no payment button.
Two things worth knowing now, because they surprise people later. Indian citizenship, not residence, is what decides whether a gift is a foreign contribution — so an Indian passport holder remitting from abroad is a domestic donor, while a friend who has taken US citizenship, or holds an OCI card, cannot give at all until the trust holds clearance under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act. That needs three years of existence and a spending record this trust will not reach before 2030.
And a deduction against Indian tax is worth nothing to a donor with no Indian taxable income. The trust will apply for the approval anyway, because it costs nothing and every future donor asks.
If you want to be told when giving opens, that is the only thing worth writing to us about today.