A free classroom that never closes.
How a small nonprofit’s website grew into Vidaara — a free, bilingual learning portal built so that a child’s income, language or ability to hear never decides how far their mind can go.
A message from Sachin Sharma, Founder — Udgam Welfare Foundation & Vidaara.
Everything you see on Vidaara began with a much smaller idea, and a much smaller website.
In 2012 I started the Udgam Welfare Foundation to do one stubborn thing: give a real education to children who were being priced out of one. I taught children from low-income families in Delhi, and children who are deaf or hard of hearing — students who are every bit as capable as any other, and who were being let down by circumstances they never chose. For years, my home online was the Foundation’s website. It explained what I was doing, shared what materials I could, and helped supporters find the work.
Where the old website reached its limits
A charity website is good at one thing: telling people what you do. What it cannot do is teach. Over time the cracks showed. My lessons lived as scattered PDFs and video links. A child could download a worksheet, but had no way to practise and find out whether they had actually understood it. There was no one to ask when they got stuck at nine in the evening. A parent had no way to see if their child was progressing. I was reaching more families than ever, and yet the tools I was handing them had barely changed in a decade.
I am a teacher, but I also write software, and I could not accept that gap. If a good lesson online can reach thirty thousand children for the effort it takes to teach thirty, then a scattered folder of PDFs was leaving most of that promise on the table.
Why I built Vidaara
So I built Vidaara — not another brochure about the work, but the classroom itself. It is a free learning portal I designed from the ground up to do what the old website never could: guide a child through a subject, let them practise, answer them when they are stuck, and show a parent how it is going. Same mission, finally with the right tools behind it.
Here is honestly how far it has come:
| Where I started — the Foundation website | Where I am now — Vidaara, the learning portal |
|---|---|
| Downloadable PDFs and scattered video links | Structured courses for Grades 1–12 in Maths, Science, English and more |
| Read it, and hope it made sense | A bilingual English–Hindi AI tutor that explains, step by step, whenever a child is stuck |
| No way to check understanding | Thousands of practice questions, chapter tests and mock exams with instant feedback |
| A parent had no visibility | Simple dashboards that let parents and teachers follow real progress |
| Content that assumed you could hear the teacher | Captioned, visual lessons built for hearing-impaired learners from the start |
| Best on a good computer | Built to run on modest phones and patchy internet — the devices people actually own |
What has not changed
The technology is new; the promise behind it is not. Vidaara is free — not “affordable”, not a trial that quietly expires, but free, because the moment a price tag appears the children I built this for walk away. It is bilingual, so language is never the reason a concept fails to land. And it is inclusive by design, because a child who cannot hear the teacher should never have to make do with material built for someone else.
Moving from a Foundation website to a full learning portal was not about chasing technology. It was about keeping an old promise properly — the promise that a child’s postcode, their family’s income, or their ability to hear would not decide how far their mind could go.
Come and begin
If you are a student, everything here is yours, at no cost — pick a subject and start. If you are a parent, create an account and watch your child grow. If you are a teacher, a developer, or someone who simply remembers who once believed in you, there is a place for you in this work.
Talent is spread evenly across every neighbourhood. Only opportunity is not. Vidaara is my attempt to even that out, one child and one lesson at a time — and I am glad you are here to see it.
— Sachin Sharma, Founder, Udgam Welfare Foundation & Vidaara