In a country that celebrates big ideas but struggles with small actions, a group of teenagers once decided to do something unusually straightforward: they noticed waste, and they acted on it.

India produces over 3.2 million tonnes of paper waste every year. Yet millions of children still leave school for lack of notebooks. That disconnect is not accidental. It is systemic. And it is routinely ignored.

In 2015, a group of 15-year-olds tried to register an NGO. They were scammed and ₹20,000 vanished. A modest sum, but everything they had. Most would have walked away but they did not.

Instead, they began collecting half-used notebooks, stitching together pages others had thrown away, and creating fresh notebooks for students who needed them. From that small uncertainty grew the Helping Society Foundation.

Over the years, they have built what institutions often promise but rarely deliver. They have recycled over 2.5 tonnes of paper and distributed 10,000 notebooks. They have organised donation drives in over 30 schools.

They have supported migrant workers with food kits and COVID-hit families with medical camps and oxygen concentrators. They have provided freezer boxes to over 150 grieving families and extended health kits to more than 1,000 frontline workers.

And they’ve done it all while continuing their jobs, studies, and daily routines; quietly, without spectacle. They did not wait for scale or for the perfect opportunity. They simply worked with what they had and responded to what was missing.

In most policy rooms, such efforts are often dismissed as temporary, unscalable, or unsystematic. But in places where no help arrives, where there is no hope and not even the comfort of acknowledgment, the act of showing up becomes a form of resistance.

In a country that has learned to function around broken systems, that quiet persistence may be the most remarkable story of all.

Be their voice and strength. Be their cape.