New Delhi, Sept. 30 -- Some years ago, Devangana Mishra, founder at Brain Bristle, found herself asking a question she couldn't quite let go of: what actually helps us become more inclusive to those who fall out of man-made moulds? She had spent almost two decades inside classrooms and leadership rooms across New York, Jakarta and Hong Kong, building systems meant to help autistic and neurodivergent children thrive. But it was back home, in Mumbai's low-income schools, that the question felt most urgent and most unanswered. Brain Bristle grew out of that urgency.
Brain Bristle started small and stayed close to the ground, working directly inside low-income schools across Mumbai, sitting with teachers who often have thirty or forty children in a classroom and no training in recognising, let alone supporting, a neurodivergent child. The starting premise was simple: inclusion isn't a policy document; it's a hundred small decisions a school makes every hour. If these decisions could be changed, a child's entire experience of school could be changed.
That premise has shaped everything that was built. The Social Work Fellowship, where the organisation selects, trains and places excellent psychologists and special educators in training into low-income schools, now supports 120+ special needs students across 16 partner schools, each with over a thousand children. The Social Work Fellows receive 18-20 hours of training and supervision every month in autism, inclusion and education. The work has now gone pan-India, training educators, schools and non-profits well beyond Mumbai, because the gap that was seen in Mumbai was not the problem of one city. It was, in some form, every under-resourced classroom's problem.
Alongside the classroom work, Devangana kept writing. A verse novel, 26, Kamala Nehru Ridge, Civil Lines, Delhi, and more recently a book of poetry and art called Desierto Florido. For her, Brain Bristle and writing are both, at their core, an attempt to put daily life to art, to put to visibility what usually goes unnoticed, to bring to life passion otherwise lost. If the classroom work is where she tried to build the structures of belonging, the writing is where she builds the inner architecture of it, so that by the time someone walks into one of our schools, they already understand, in their body, why any of this matters.
It is known that systemic change takes time. But it's encouraging. Teachers who once had no vocabulary for what they were seeing in a child now have language, and more importantly, small tools. Schools that treated a neurodivergent child as a discipline or an intellectual problem have now started asking what needs to change in the room. A growing number of educators across the country are coming to see inclusive practice as something learnable, not innate.
A lot of this work happens in rooms that never make it into a report. Devangana thinks of a teacher in one of her partner schools who, after a few days of watching our Social Work Fellow build systems of inclusion, changed nothing about her curriculum but asked: would placing him by the wall instead of the window help him focus? That curiosity is a metric of growth. That willingness to include, and to collaborate at the school level toward the same vision, is exactly what Brain Bristle is trying to multiply across hundreds of classrooms. Not grand interventions, but the right small one, made possible because we created a system where inclusion works, and is easily possible.
Looking ahead, three things sit at the centre of their plans.
First, sharpening the Social Work Fellowship, and taking the Modules of Learning to 50 schools and NPOs across the country, so that institutions that could never host a Brain Bristle team in person can still build real inclusion capability on their own timeline. The first cohort of the modules opens this September, running twenty sessions from September to June.
Second, building a stronger bridge between the classroom and the wider public conversation, through writing, public art and dialogue, because inclusion spreads faster through stories, impact and real advocacy than through circulars.
And third, bringing parents and communities across India into this work more directly, since a child's experience of belonging doesn't stop at the school gate.
Devangana keeps returning to that idea because she has seen it work both ways. A teacher who reads a storybook to the whole class sometimes catches a distracted child faster than one who reads a training manual on autism or ADHD. And a reader who has never set foot in one of the schools sometimes understands what they are trying to do the moment they read a few honest lines about a child who didn't fit the room but now matches crayons to his teacher's saree. Story and inclusive structures aren't competing projects.
What has been accomplished by Brain Bristle is a wonderful example of Nexus of Good. Here is a model that can be replicated and scaled through public-private partnership.
Views expressed are personal. The writer is an author and a former civil servant
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.