TRUTIYA RATNA · STORIES OF IMPACT
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Leadership Development
Higher Education Support
TR Team Member
Anguri Kumari: From a Village in Jamui to Two States She'd Never Seen
Married at 15 and struggling to feed her family a year later, she found her way to a classroom — and then far beyond it.
Anguri Kumari is from Khandaich village in Jamui district, Bihar. She was married in 2019, at the age of 15, while still in Class 9. Within five or six months, her in-laws separated from her, and soon after, she had her first child.
Her husband worked in brick-kiln labour, and the family struggled badly — there were days they couldn’t manage two meals, and no money to buy milk for her baby. She borrowed from others just to get by. At the time, she says, no one stood beside her.
In 2021, she sat for her Class 10 board exam. The following year, someone from Patna visited her village and asked if she could teach children. She said yes, and began with four children.
She did well enough that she was soon connected more closely with Trutiya Ratna. Speaking up, at first, did not come easily — she was afraid of saying the wrong thing, unsure how to hold a conversation. Her role eventually meant visiting schools, meeting principals and school staff, and speaking with the mukhiya and other community members in her in-laws’ village — settings she once found intimidating to enter as a young woman married into the community rather than raised in it. With practice, she built the confidence to lead these conversations herself.
“Before, I believed that if a girl studies, all she’ll end up doing is housework anyway — that girls shouldn’t study, only learn to run a home, and that praying to God is what makes for a good life. Joining Trutiya Ratna showed me none of that is true. If we don’t work, God won’t bring us anything — we eat only because we work.”
Alongside teaching, Anguri is now continuing her own education. Joining Trutiya Ratna also gave her the chance to travel outside Bihar for the first time — to another state, and later to Goa for training — meeting people and seeing places she’d never imagined. When she went to Goa, some people in her village told her husband he shouldn’t have let her go so far, warning that she might not come back — afraid, in her words, that she would move ahead.
She has now been with Trutiya Ratna for five years. In that time, the organisation has supported her through her children’s illnesses, helped rebuild her house after it collapsed, given her a new phone to continue her studies, and arranged subject-wise tutors for her.
“I never thought I would reach this far,” she says. “I was on a path with no fixed destination — Trutiya Ratna’s people understood me when no one else did, and brought me somewhere I hadn’t imagined I could reach.” She closes with what has become her own philosophy: that education and good values are what keep a person standing — one keeps you from bowing down, the other from falling — and that success comes only to those willing to keep trying, again and again, until it does.