Mrs. Lilly Vargis

A teacher at heart.

Born and raised in a small South Indian village, Lilly Vargis grew up with one dream: to become a teacher. Life took a different path — marriage brought her to North India — but the dream never left her.

On 30th October 1972, she arrived in Katra, Jammu & Kashmir, with her husband and young children. The neighbourhood she came to live in was home to a community of manual scavengers — families bound to the most degrading work society could assign, their children growing up without schooling, without hygiene, without hope of anything different.

Where others looked away, Lilly opened her door. She began taking the community's children into her own home. She bathed them, cleaned them, fed them — and then sat them down and taught them their first letters. What began as informal tuition in a living room became something more: one by one, she walked those children to the local schools and made sure each was formally enrolled.

For the parents, it was the first time anyone had treated their children as children — worthy of touch, of time, of a future. For Lilly, it was the beginning of a lifelong conviction: that the distance between a marginalised child and a transformed life is one person willing to care.

"Every child who walked through my door taught me the same lesson — there are no unreachable people, only people no one has reached."

That conviction became the foundation of Navjeevan Community Development Society. Today, the work she started with a handful of children in Katra continues through 53 tuition centres, free surgical camps, tailoring classrooms, and relief operations across India — every one of them an echo of that first open door.