Every district collector’s office has a chair reserved for visitors, but in Gujarat’s Chhota Udepur, collector Gargi Jain chose a different one: a plastic chair inside a government school classroom, pulled up beside girls who had never had an officer of her rank sit down and simply listen. There was no inspection register, no entourage, just conversation.
Today, those students do not call her “Madam Collector.” They call her Collector Didi, and that shift in address has become the foundation of an initiative quietly reshaping how tribal girls in the district experience school.
Jain, a 2015-batch IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre, took charge of Chhota Udepur, one of the state’s most tribal-dominated districts, in February 2025.
The district, home mainly to the Rathva community, was carved out of Vadodara district in 2013 and remains a place where girls are frequently the first in their families to attend school, with financial hardship, early marriage, and a lack of visible role models pushing many out of the classroom before they finish it.
The pattern is not unique to Chhota Udepur; poverty and early marriage have long driven dropout across Gujarat’s tribal belt, which is why sustained, trust-based outreach matters as much as scholarships or infrastructure.
From “madam collector” to “collector didi”
Jain calls the initiative ‘Collector in Classroom’. For the past year, she has set aside time every week to visit girls’ schools across tribal blocks of the district, turning ordinary classrooms into spaces where students speak freely about their dreams, fears, and family pressures.
“When I became the Collector of Chhota Udepur, I regularly started visiting schools attended by girls in tribal areas. I wanted these girls to know that their dreams are just as valid as anyone else’s,” she has said.
In a district where girls often leave school early, Jain’s weekly visits are helping turn classrooms into spaces of confidence and possibility.
The programme now directly mentors more than 750 girls across five Kanya Vidyalayas, joining a broader list of district collectors whose unconventional initiatives have reshaped local governance across India.
Jain does not confine the sessions to academics. She speaks to the girls about life skills, communication, confidence, and legal rights, and fields questions ranging from the UPSC exam to engineering, medicine, and police services, not unlike collectors who have revived residential campuses for tribal children in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district to keep them from dropping out.
The story she waited years to tell
The most defining part of each session is personal. Jain tells the girls about an incident from her own childhood, when a fellow bus passenger subjected her to inappropriate touch while she was travelling with her mother, an experience she carried silently for years without telling anyone.
Sharing it now lets her explain the difference between good touch and bad touch and encourage the girls to speak up rather than stay silent, an approach that echoes how other officers have used braille-based lessons to bring visually impaired tribal children into government classrooms in Chhattisgarh.
For many students in Chhota Udepur, it is the first time an adult in authority has spoken to them this openly about their own safety.
From dropout numbers to a bigger dream
The results are measurable. In 2025, nearly 9,000 children had dropped out of school across Chhota Udepur. By 2026, that number had fallen to around 5,500, with nearly 4,500 students returning to classrooms, an overall reduction of about 39%.
Among girls specifically, the dropout rate fell by nearly 60% within a year, a decline achieved through a combination of government schemes and sustained outreach under Collector in Classroom.
For Jain, the numbers are only part of the ambition. “I will not stop until five tribal girls become IAS officers,” she has said, a goal that recalls how AI-based learning support has helped students across more than 350 government schools in Rajasthan’s Tonk district build the confidence to keep pace with their studies. Every classroom visit brings that goal a little closer.
Leadership is often measured in policy announcements and inaugurations, but Jain’s initiative suggests it can also be measured in a chair pulled up beside a student instead of across a desk.
If a girl from Chhota Udepur eventually walks into the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration as an IAS probationer, the journey will not have started at a coaching institute. It will have started in a tribal classroom, where a collector chose to listen before she chose to lead.
