It’s a Tuesday morning, and 16-year-old Bhumika is kneading dough for rotis. Her hands move slowly and unevenly as cerebral palsy makes even this simple task an effort of balance and patience.
Her sister sits beside her, ready to help if the dough slips or her grip gives out. Studying in Class 8 at her local government school, this is what Bhumika’s mornings look like now. She rolls dough, boils water and makes her favourite noodles. Most of all, she waits to go back to the place that helped her learn to do all of this.
Tuesday used to mean something else. Twice a week, Bhumika would make her way to an inclusive education centre a short walk from her home in Mazdoor Camp, Okhla Phase 2, Delhi — run by ASTHA India, a not-for-profit that helps educate children with disabilities.
Asked what she liked about going there, her answer was simple: “They treat me well and they teach me how to use a computer, which is fun!”
She’d sit at a keyboard and practise moving a mouse, opening a folder, closing it and opening it again, until her fingers understood what her brain already knew. Then came the part of the week she looked forward to most. “Once a week we are taught football and basketball. I enjoy sports and my favourite player is Dhoni,” she says.
The rest of her week falls into a rhythm she can recite without thinking: “I go to school the rest of the days.” She attends Class 8 at her local government school four days a week, and spends the remaining two days at the centre.
Ask her if she misses her beloved centre, and she doesn’t take long to answer. “Yes, ma’am. I miss it a lot. I have friends here who understand me and my teacher is very kind.”
But that centre has been shut for more than a week now.
The night the centre burned
On the evening of 23 July 2026, a fire broke out inside the centre. It was around eight o’clock at night, and since the centre had already closed for the day, there was no one inside. Neighbours soon noticed the smoke, opened the doors and began trying to put out the flames with water.
Lakshmi, a community volunteer who lives just a few houses from the centre, was among the first to know. Her children were playing nearby when they noticed the smoke. “Our kids came running, saying smoke was coming out, that there was a fire,” she says.
By the time she reached the centre with water, the smoke was already too thick, and there weren’t enough hands to put it out fast enough.
Around 30 people from the community stayed back for three to four hours, using the fire extinguisher available on the premises and salvaging whatever they could. Lakshmi and another mother, whose children with disabilities learn at the centre, stayed the entire night after that, without being asked and without being paid.
“They didn’t have to stay all night, but they did because the centre means a lot for these families for whom help is not easy to access,” says Pratik Agarwal, Executive Director of the NGO, who oversees its daily operations, from enrolling children to ensuring they get what they need each day.
Nobody was hurt. But almost nothing inside survived.
By morning, the room was black with soot. On one wall, a rainbow the children had painted together was still faintly visible underneath it.
That rainbow survived the fire. Now, you can help bring the colours around it back. Your support can turn this soot-covered room into Bhumika’s classroom again, and give 85 children a place to return to.
What 85 children lost in one night
For Bhumika, the room held one of her first opportunities to learn how to use a computer, the one she hoped might help her become a teacher someday. “Ma’am, I want to be a teacher and help children like my teacher helps me now,” she says.
She wants to become like Mona ma’am, her special educator at the centre, the woman who runs the children’s daily sessions, plans their individualised lessons, and treats every child like there is nothing in the world they cannot do.
The fire took the wheelchairs, the special chairs, the therapy mats, the sensory tools, the whiteboards, the almirahs, and every child’s stationery and teaching material along with it. Six wheelchairs and five special chairs, designed to support children who cannot sit upright independently, were destroyed.
Two rollators (frames that some children lean on to take their first independent steps) went with them, along with a full set of bolsters, writing wedges, and therapy and floor mats used every session to build posture and core strength.
A weighted blanket and a sensory stimulation kit, used to help children with sensory needs calm themselves, were reduced to ash. Without them, some children find it hard to settle into a session.
The whiteboards the teachers wrote each day’s lesson on are gone, along with the almirahs that stored every child’s individual file and material. Three laptops and desktops — the very computers children were learning to navigate — melted, along with a year’s worth of teaching material, stationery for all 85 children, and the water purifier the kids used between sessions.
“A child who cannot sit unsupported cannot do anything else. They simply lie down and stare at the ceiling all day without these basic materials,” Bhumika’s beloved ‘Mona ma’am’ shares as she describes what was lost.
The equipment that helped children sit, move, learn and participate in each session is exactly what the fire destroyed.
A wheelchair can help a child sit up. A rollator can support a first independent step. A sensory kit can make it possible to stay through a lesson. The fire took these small bridges to independence away. But you can help build them back.
A centre built on trust
Established in 1993, Astha has run its centres in some of Delhi’s toughest, most overlooked pockets for 33 years: first as special schools, and for the last several years as community-based organisations working across disabilities, free of charge and at the doorstep of families who have few other places to turn.
Between 20 and 30 percent of its staff are themselves people with disabilities, or family members of people with disabilities, which is part of why families here trust it enough to bring their children through its doors in the first place.
This centre sits in the Mazdoor Camp region along the industrial stretch of Okhla where migrant families live in the shadow of factories, with new luxury apartments now rising just across the road.
Currently, 85 children and young adults aged 8 to 18 are on its rolls, Bhumika among them. Every one of them has lost their sessions this week.
“These families mostly consist of daily wage labourers who work hard from morning to night and cannot always be there for differently-abled kids. So siblings drop out of school to take care of them, from helping with basic hygiene and feeding to helping them learn small habits,” explains Pratik.
He adds, “Many are single mothers whose husbands fled when they found out about their child’s condition. Yet, the mothers work very hard and try everything to support their children. In times like these, when support is taken away, they struggle,” explains Pratik.
For 33 years, families here have had a door they could knock on for support. Today, they need your help to open it again, and bring their children back to a place they know, love and depend on.
Routines broken, all at once
But the centre’s rhythm, once built around routine, has gone quiet in a way that’s easy to miss from the outside but impossible to miss if you’re one of the families who count on it.
Morning and afternoon group sessions have stopped. Lakshmi’s own son, Shivansh, is one of the children now going without these vital sessions.
“He has a speech impairment, and outside of school hours, the centre was where he had somewhere to go, and people around him who understood him. At school, that understanding doesn’t always follow him. With the centre shut, his days outside class now have nothing in them at all,” Lakshmi says
Astha’s educators are still visiting families door-to-door each morning, but where they once ran full sessions with individualised care, they now manage three or four home visits before the morning ends.
For 15-year-old Zeenat, who has cerebral palsy and speech impairments, support was hard to come by from the beginning. Her mother, Khushboo, remembers people telling her, “No one thought this child was worth the effort. Don’t waste your mind on her. Plan for your other child instead.”
She fought those voices anyway, and eventually moved to Delhi to give Zeenat a chance.
Even a place at the local Anganwadi was hard to hold onto. Discrimination followed them both — other parents wouldn’t let their children sit with Zeenat, or let her join their games.
“For years, Zeenat was too frightened to leave the house. Crowds scared her, and the world outside felt like something to hide from. It was only after she started at Astha that the fear began to fade. Slowly, she made friends. She started to look forward to leaving home instead of dreading it,” Khushboo says.
The fire has undone some of that. “There was so much help we got from Astha. So much,” Khushboo says. “But now it’s stopped, and we are worried.”
Once, when Zeenat was away in her village for a month and a half, she missed the centre so much she kept talking about what she’d do the moment she got back — the games, the materials, the people. Right now, none of that is there to go back to.
For children with disabilities, missing these sessions can mean losing a routine that supports their progress. Progress for children like Bhumika and Zeenat takes shape session by session, week by week, in small repeated movements until they become natural.
The longer the centre stays shut, the harder that rhythm is to pick back up — and every week of delay pushes reopening, and 85 children’s routines, further out.
Zeenat learnt to step outside without fear. Bhumika learnt to use a computer and began dreaming of becoming a teacher. They have come too far to lose that progress now. Your help can get them back to the routines, friends and classrooms that helped them get here.
How you can help rebuild the centre
Astha is aiming to reopen within one to two weeks, by early August. Getting there costs Rs 7,92,900 in total, in three parts:
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Rs 5,43,900 to replace what actually burned — the wheelchairs, special chairs, therapy mats, sensory kits, and stationery and teaching material for all 85 children.
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Rs 99,000 for the safety work a basic whitewash won’t cover — a proper electrical board with an earth-leakage trip, earthing, fire extinguishers, smoke alarms, and clearing out carpet that’s burnt through and can’t be cleaned.
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Rs 1,50,000 to strengthen the centre with equipment it didn’t have before the fire — laptops, a printer, and a projector for the older children’s computer lessons, the very kind of equipment children were learning on.
The first two parts — Rs 6,42,900 together — are what it takes just to open the doors again. A donor who wants to give only towards what the fire destroyed can direct their gift to the first part alone, and it will still be enough to get the centre running.
To give a sense of scale: Rs 10,000 replaces one child’s wheelchair. Rs 12,000 replaces the sensory kit a child needs just to stay regulated through a session. Rs 50,000 covers a year of stationery and teaching material for all 85 children. No gift is too small to be counted directly against one of these.
“Nothing is happening in the centre right now,” Pratik says. “We don’t want to lose touch with families. But there are constraints because the team is small and we do our best to cover as many people as possible.”
Every week the centre stays shut, that gap grows — more home visits missed, more sessions lost, and a longer stretch for children like Shivansh with nowhere to go and nothing to do.
For Shivansh, it means afternoons with nowhere to go and no one nearby who understands him the way people at the centre do.
For Bhumika, it means staying away from the room where she was learning to use a computer, playing football with her friends and imagining herself as a teacher one day.
That room is still standing. The rainbow the children painted is still there beneath the soot. And 85 children are waiting to come back.
Zeenat is waiting for her friends. Bhumika is waiting to return to the computer and the dream it helped her build.
This is where you come in.
Help reopen that door. Help put the wheelchairs, mats and learning tools back in that room, and these children back to the lives they were building inside it.
You can reach Astha India via email at [email protected], or call the helpline at 9560874098. For donation-related queries, donors can get in touch at +91 88608 88546.