My name is Raghvendra Pratap Singh and I belong to a backward village in Uttar Pradesh. Till the age of ten, I completed my education with the limited resources of my village, and due to the strictness of my elder brother and sister gave full attention to my studies. Because of this, I was not involved in any other extra-curricular activities.
Seeing the quality of education in my village, I decided at the age of 11 that I should live in a city for better education and opportunities, so since then, I have been living alone without my family. I completed my higher secondary education at Air Force School Gwalior. After which I joined Deen Dayal Upadhyaya College, University of Delhi. During school time, I was not involved in any extra-curricular activities, but after coming to college, I participated in many extra-curricular activities, and competitions and became more interactive, which boosted my confidence. When I was 15-16 years old i.e. during school I saw videos of Varun Pruthi sir in which he used to give gifts to beggars and not money. Inspired by Varun sir and seeing young children asking others for money, I got inspired to make India a beggar-free country.
Since childhood, I have seen people begging on the streets. Some children did not get bread, clothes, and even a house in childhood, and on the other hand, I was getting every possible best facility of education, health, or food. These facilities made me value those things and sensitized me towards people who are without such needs so I started helping Hut NGO which became the first step towards making India a beggar-free country.
I have the vision to make India a beggar-free country, where every person has a job and instead of begging, he is responsible for earning bread and butter through his hard work. Begging should never be a substitute for earning a livelihood. Along with this, our organization started a campaign to make people aware of beggars, in which people were made aware that they should not give money to beggars, give them food to eat, or give some essential items as a gift.
Apart from this, I believe that education is the most powerful weapon of this era by which we can make the country self-reliant and beggar-free. Keeping this in mind I started “Udaan-Street School” with our tireless volunteers, under which we are teaching 250+ students at different places every day and also developing basic moral values. Along with this we also organize some fun activities for kids like drawing competitions, food competitions, various games, etc.
At the time of Kovid, I tried to form teams in almost every city of India under Helping Hut with my volunteers and in the end, different teams of more than 2000 volunteers were formed in 15 to 20 cities. After this, we issued a helpline number, through which people used to contact oxygen cylinders and other medical facilities. Our team used to provide the goods as per the requirement in the shortest possible time.
One day I got a message from an unknown number that because of me and my team, a member of his family was saved and I got a lot of encouragement after reading that message.
Currently, under Helping Hut, we have teams in more than 10 cities in India with over 750 volunteers registered.
