Most adults in India don’t feel confident with money. Around 76% can’t. And it’s worse for kids from low-income families. They grow up watching their parents survive, not plan. So they end up doing the same thing, just because that’s all they’ve seen.
FinLight is a small initiative we run out of New Delhi. We’re trying to break that pattern. Not with pamphlets, not with lectures. With workshops, a wooden savings box, and the idea that every kid should be allowed to feel okay about money, no matter what their family earns.
It’s not really a charity. We think of it more as a skills project.
Why it matters
When a family is just trying to get through the month, no one really sits down and talks about saving or investing. There isn’t time, and honestly, there isn’t much joy in those conversations. Schools rarely teach it either. So kids grow up with no real plan for money. By the time they’re adults, they’re stuck. They take bad loans because they don’t know any better. They never save for emergencies because no one told them why they should. And the same cycle keeps repeating.
The good thing is, the window to change all of this is open for a few years.
Behavioural studies have been pretty clear for a while now. The money habits you pick up before you’re a teenager tend to stay with you. A kid who learns to keep aside ₹10 at age ten is way more likely to be saving at thirty. So if you reach them young, you’re not just changing one moment. You’re changing the whole shape of how they think about money for the rest of their life.
How a workshop actually runs
A FinLight workshop is not a lecture. Vevaan, who started this, joins live on the classroom screen, kind of like a Zoom call. The kids sit at their desks. A facilitator helps from the front. And the conversation goes both ways. We talk about budgeting. We talk about how to spot a scam. The kids argue about what counts as a “need” and what’s actually a “want.” Sometimes the argument gets pretty loud.
Then comes the Gullak.
Every student gets one. It’s a wooden savings box, etched with a grid that fills up to ₹2,000 in small deposits. Every cell stands for a deposit. ₹10, ₹20, ₹50. The kid ticks one off every time they save something. By the time the grid is full, they’ve saved ₹2,000 and the habit is built. They’ve done it with their own hands. For most of them it’s the first time they’ve ever had a real way to save.
A Gullak costs ₹250. That’s the whole math, nothing hidden. ₹2,000 gives one to 8 kids. ₹50,000 covers a full senior cohort.
Where we are today
As of May 2026, we’ve done 15 workshops at Literacy India Vidyapeeth in Gurugram. Over 150 students have been part of them. That works out to about 22.5 hours of actual financial education.
We document everything. Dates, attendance, photos of the slides the kids saw that day. Nothing is kept off the record. Honestly, when donations are small and trust is everything, transparency isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the only way this kind of project works.
The setup is pretty lean. A small group of private donors covers our admin and operational costs. So when you donate, 100% of it goes into workshops, materials, and Gullaks. Nothing is taken out for overhead. In a sector where 30% or more of a donation often disappears into paperwork, that’s a real difference.
What kids actually take away
The first thing is knowledge. They leave understanding what a budget is. What a savings account does. The difference between something you need and something you just want right now.
But there’s a second thing that might matter even more. We don’t have a great word for it. The closest one is permission.
In a lot of low-income households, money is something you don’t talk about. It feels embarrassing. Or stressful. Or just too complicated. A FinLight classroom is the opposite of that. It’s a place where a 13-year-old can put up their hand and ask “what’s an EMI” and not feel dumb. Where saving sounds like a skill, not something only rich kids do. Where the idea of being good with money feels normal.
That shift in how a kid feels about themselves, from “this isn’t for people like me” to “this is for me too,” is probably the most lasting thing a workshop does. You won’t find it on any slide. But you can see it in the way the kid sits a little straighter by the end of the session.
Why being student-led makes a difference
Most financial literacy programs in India come from one of three places. Big NGOs, government bodies, or corporate CSR teams. They all do good work. But they’re also pretty far from the communities they’re trying to reach. Decisions are made in Mumbai or Delhi offices, and by the time they reach a kid, there are usually three or four people in between.
FinLight works differently. We’re young, and we’re not very far in age from the kids we teach. When a Class 12 student is leading a session for Class 8 kids, the message lands in a different way. It doesn’t feel like a grown-up in a suit explaining money. It feels more like an older sibling sharing something they figured out.
That closeness also means we can change things quickly. If something doesn’t work in a workshop, we change it before the next one. Not in six months, not after a review cycle. Just the next time.
Where we’re going
15 workshops have not changed India. We know that. We’re small, and India is huge.
But real change doesn’t usually start big. It starts with proof. Proof that the model works. Proof that the kids show up and learn. Proof that something is actually happening. On all of that, we feel we’ve made a start.
Going from 15 workshops to 1,500 is going to take time. More funding, more schools, more trust built up slowly. But the base is there. A model that works. A way of running things that’s open. And a real product that goes home in every kid’s bag.
The point
We’re not trying to end poverty. We’re not pretending one workshop or one Gullak will fix inequality. What we’re doing is smaller and, hopefully, more useful. We’re reaching kids at the age when their money habits are just starting to form, and we’re giving them the tools their parents never got.
Every Gullak we give out is a small bet. A bet that this kid, with the right idea at the right time, will end up with a different relationship to money than the one they grew up with.
Not every bet works out. But enough of them do that the cycle starts to break.
And really, that’s the whole project.
FinLight is a student-led financial literacy initiative based in New Delhi. To learn more or support the work, visit finlight.org or make a donation.