The morning is wet. A low fog sits over the hills of Manipur, and somewhere inside a bamboo shelter that passes for a kitchen, a six-year-old is stirring a pot.
She is cooking her own breakfast. In an hour, she will walk to school.
Children in remote Manipur villages often cook meals themselves before school
This is not an exception. For children in many of the region’s remote villages, this is simply Tuesday. The classrooms nearby are built from whatever the village could spare — and they are full of children who will sit on whatever bench exists, share whatever notebook can be found, and learn in whatever patch of light comes through the gaps in the roof.
Getting to school means crossing streams that run fast during the monsoon, walking on paths that aren’t really paths. Shoes give out. Socks wear thin. Uniforms get washed mid-week because there’s only one set. And still, every morning, they come.
Children walk long distances daily through rough terrain to attend school.
What keeps them coming is the question worth sitting with. Because it isn’t infrastructure — there’s almost none. It isn’t government support — that has been thin for decades. It is something more stubborn than either of those things. Something that looks, from a distance, a lot like hope.
And it is precisely in places like these that a small organisation called Sunbird Trust decided to plant itself.
The land that swallows roads
To understand why any of this is hard, you have to understand what Northeast India actually is. Not the idea of it — the physical fact of it.
Eight states. Dozens of ethnic communities. Hundreds of languages. A geography that seems designed to make everything harder. Villages are scattered across forested hills, river islands, and high plateaus. During the monsoon, some communities are cut off entirely for weeks. Roads appear on government maps that don’t match anything on the ground. Electricity arrives and disappears. Phone signals are a matter of luck and altitude.
Farms in hilly regions use land across steep slopes and difficult terrain.
And beneath all of that terrain is history. Decades of conflict, insurgency, and political neglect have left the region’s schools under-resourced and its communities economically isolated. Many schools run with skeleton staff. Teachers sometimes travel hours to reach their postings. Infrastructure is an afterthought at best.
Schools in remote districts often function with limited infrastructure and staff.
For families here, education is a fierce and stubborn hope. But when feeding the household is a daily calculation, schooling loses the race. Children drop out not because they don’t want to learn. They drop out because the distance between wanting and getting is just too wide.
That distance — not a metaphor, but a literal, physical, historical distance — is what this story is really about.
Too small to see the problem
Col Christopher Rego (Retd.) and his wife Myrna didn’t set out to build an organisation. They started by sponsoring a handful of students from remote villages in Mizoram — just helping, in the way people sometimes do when they see something they can’t unsee.
Sunbird Trust began by supporting a small group of students in remote villages.
But the more they helped, the more clearly they could see the edges of what was actually wrong. Individual sponsorship mattered. It changed lives. And yet it kept running into the same walls: schools that couldn’t function, hostels that didn’t exist, communities that had been left alone for so long they’d quietly stopped expecting anything different.
In 2012, during one of Manipur’s recurring periods of unrest, Christopher Rego was asked to help build a hostel for a small school in Ijeirong village, in what was then Tamenglong district. What he found when he arrived wasn’t an infrastructure problem. It was children — very young children — living alone in fragile bamboo-and-tin shelters, cooking for themselves, managing their days without a single adult around.
The need wasn’t complicated. A safe place to sleep. A kitchen that worked. Toilets. The kind of things that shouldn’t be aspirational for any child, anywhere.
A hostel built in Ijeirong enabled students from nearby villages to stay and study.
Villagers came together with wood, stone, and their own labour. Rego arranged cement and funding. The local Assam Rifles commander contributed roofing sheets. Friends sent money. Six months later, the hostel was standing.
Over the next three years, enrolment at the school grew from 70 students to 250. Not because anything changed about the children’s desire to learn — that had always been there. But because children from nearby villages could now stay.
That is what a building can do, when it’s the right building. And it was enough to show the Regos what they were really dealing with — not a handful of students who needed sponsoring, but a region that needed sustained, structural attention. Sunbird Trust was born from that realisation.
How students reached college and jobs
The easiest way to understand what Sunbird actually does is to follow a few of the people it has walked alongside.
Kollo Athisu grew up in the Senapati district, in a part of Manipur where higher education was something you heard about, not something you planned for. With Sunbird’s support, he made it to the Xavier Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship in Bengaluru, completed his MBA, and joined HDFC Bank. His brothers are now pursuing their own MBAs. One generation, one door opened — and the direction of an entire family shifts.
Students supported by Sunbird progress from village schools to higher education.
In the Noney district, Kezia Bariamtak finished her BSc in Agriculture. Then she came back. She works with Sunbird now, part of a quiet but growing group of alumni who return not because they have nowhere else to go, but because they choose to.
Schools supported by Sunbird include facilities like music labs and activity spaces.
Dollar Kongjengbam from Bishnupur district completed an engineering degree in Bengaluru, won a fully-funded postgraduate place at the University of Padua in Italy, and is now working toward a doctorate. A few years ago, he was a kid in a village in Manipur. That’s not a metaphor — it’s just what happened when the gap between potential and access was bridged.
Three people. Three completely different trajectories. The same common thread: someone stepped in at the right moment and made access possible.
Education is also a peace plan
Aliasgar Huseini Janjali, Sunbird’s CEO, articulates the organisation’s philosophy carefully: “Educating citizens is the bedrock on which nations are built, but without long-lasting peace, there can be no meaningful human development.”
This isn’t a tagline. In Northeast India, it’s an observation borne out by decades of lived experience. A generation that grows up with access to learning — with mentors, with opportunity, with the experience of simply being taken seriously — has more roads available to it than conflict.
Students across Sunbird-supported schools come from diverse remote communities.
That’s not idealism. That’s what eleven years of working in these communities has shown. The two things — education and peace — are not separate programmes. They feed each other, or they starve each other. There is no third option.
It also explains why Sunbird has never operated from a fixed ideology about community or identity. It goes where the need is. The expansion into five additional northeastern states happened not through strategy sessions but because communities in those states reached out and asked. That kind of invitation is hard to earn and even harder to ignore.
‘Schools need presence, not sympathy’
Over the past decade, the numbers have grown in ways that would have seemed improbable in that first hostel in Ijeirong. Fifteen schools built. Twenty-one hostels. Water tanks, sanitation facilities, and community halls. More than 53,000 annual scholarships. Close to 600 students are supported through higher education. Over 300 of those students are now employed. Four lakh lives touched in total, across six northeastern states.
Sunbird supports multiple schools across northeastern states for rural children.
But numbers, as anyone who works in these villages knows, only carry you so far.
Sponsorships cover 60 to 70 percent of school fees, with families contributing the rest. That split is deliberate — shared ownership changes how people relate to something. Students are selected through a process that weighs grades, financial background, personal circumstances, and something harder to measure: the desire to give back. Those who show it are prioritised.
Solar lights have been distributed in remote villages lacking electricity access.
“These schools did not need sympathy,” says Shanmukha Priya Chadarada, Sunbird’s fundraising manager. “They needed presence, attention, and investment — a simple acknowledgement that their effort matters.”
In the most difficult-to-reach areas — remote corners of Eastern Nagaland, communities cut off by both terrain and tension — Sunbird has worked alongside Schneider Electric, the Gharda Foundation, the Assam Rifles, and the Indian Army to get solar lamps, street lights, and relief materials to places that nothing else was reaching.
Solar lights were distributed in border villages during periods of limited access.
During COVID-19, and again during the recent ethnic conflict in Manipur, displaced students were relocated so their schooling could continue. The commitment, in both cases, was to continuity — to not letting a crisis become a full stop.
Farming in a school?
Classrooms are only part of the picture. And Sunbird has always understood that a child’s ability to stay in school is connected to whether their family can afford to keep them there — which is connected to whether the family’s livelihood is stable.
Which is how a programme about education ends up also being about soil.
In the hilly regions, many families have traditionally practised shifting cultivation — moving from plot to plot, clearing and burning, which works until it doesn’t, and tends to degrade the land over time. Through the Sloping Agricultural Land Technology approach, Sunbird works with farming families to cultivate fixed plots more sustainably: hedgerows along slopes to hold soil and water, multiple crops, livestock integrated into the system, and compost rebuilding what the earth has lost.
SALT farming helps families grow multiple crops on fixed plots sustainably.
Roda Inka, a farmer and teacher connected to Sunbird’s work, puts a number to it: “In a year, from the SALT farm, I am getting about Rs 70,000–80,000. I am growing over 15 varieties of crops and using manure from my goats. I can see the soil quality improving. Earlier, it was very dry. Now it is getting better.”
Eighty thousand rupees. Fifteen crop varieties. Improving soil. These are not development metrics in a report — they are the texture of someone’s life becoming more stable, season by season.
A more stable family keeps its children in school longer. That’s the logic. It is quiet, unglamorous, and it works.
‘I am more confident now’
Philangam Horam joined Alpha Friendship School in Kachai in 2022. The initiative was there — anyone who spent five minutes with her could see it. What wasn’t there were structures to channel it.
When student councils and extracurricular activities were introduced at the school, something shifted. Philangam grew into a leader her school hadn’t known it had. She became Head Girl. In 2025, she received a full scholarship to UWC Mahindra College in Pune — one of the most competitive scholarship programmes in the country.
Her story is not unique. That’s the point.
Teachers and staff undergo training to strengthen school education systems.
In Assam, through the Bhoomi Programme run by the Rohan Bopanna Tennis Academy with Sunbird’s support, children from Majuli and Dhemaji — most of whom had never held a racket — entered structured training programmes in Bengaluru. For many, it was the first time someone had looked at them and seen an athlete.
Chamrinba Bariam, a sponsored student, says it plainly: “My time with Sunbird Trust shaped me beyond academics. It helped me build confidence, leadership, discipline, and belief in my own potential. It taught me responsibility, teamwork, and the importance of giving back.”
That last part — giving back — is the part Sunbird is counting on. Alumni return as interns, then as full-time staff. Schools receive support until they can run independently. Sponsorships carry students through Class 10 and beyond. The model isn’t built for the press release. It’s built for the long haul.
Eleven years in
“Our impact is measured not just in schools or infrastructure,” says Janjali, “but in the confidence, resilience, and hope we help nurture.”
Programme manager Ayushi Pandey describes the team simply: “What sets us apart is our collective motivation to create meaningful impact.” Fifty-three people, spread across six states, are doing work that mostly goes unnoticed by anyone who doesn’t depend on it.
Infrastructure like water tanks supports schools and surrounding communities.
Eleven years in, the work is still growing. Not because Sunbird found some formula that solves everything — there is no such formula — but because the approach itself turns out to be rarer than it should be. Turn up. Listen. Stay. Do what’s useful. Don’t leave when it gets complicated.
Every morning, in remote villages across Northeast India, children get up before dawn, cook what there is, and walk to school. Some of them cross streams. Some of them walk in the dark. Some of them wear the same uniform all week.
Sunbird Trust has spent over a decade making sure that when those children arrive, there is something worth arriving for. Not a perfect school. Not a fully-funded future. Just a door that’s open, and someone on the other side who believes they should walk through it.
That, it turns out, is enough to change everything.
