Arihant Foundation
It began at home.
Sangeeta Desarda grew up in a house where service was not an occasion — it was the daily weather. Her father, Professor Hiralal Desarda, was an economist who set aside position and title to devote his life to social welfare: championing farmers, fighting for water conservation, advocating tirelessly across India for the land and the people who live from it. Her mother, Shakuntala, a nutritionist, taught that sustainable food and farming could quietly transform a family's life. Their example cast a deep and lasting impression.
It followed her into the law — through more than a decade of practice at the Aurangabad Bench of the Bombay High Court, where she watched the people who most needed justice arrive least equipped to claim it.
And all the while, one truth kept sharpening: the world was not moving toward its Sustainable Development Goals — it was drifting away from them. A better world, she realised, does not happen on its own. Someone has to bring it about.
So during the COVID years, she committed herself to a single question: what can ordinary people do at the grassroots that ripples into something far bigger? Her answer, in August 2022, was Arihant Foundation — a name that, in an old Indian tradition, belongs to those who conquer their inner enemies. Fear. Apathy. Indifference.
At its heart lies her deepest conviction: education is the greatest leveler — the greatest edge this generation holds. Shared equally between girls and boys, it is how she believes every crisis of sustainability, from inequality to a warming planet, will finally be solved.
