Sister Cyril is a veracious crusader for child rights and educational reforms in India. Her unique contribution has seen her bridge the chasm that separates India's privileged children from those born to poor parents. Sister Cyril is the architect of the ground-breaking educational project which offers free education to the children of the urban and rural poor.

In a country stratified into layers of "haves" and "have-nots," Sister Cyril Mooney, principal of Loreto Sealdah school since 1979, has pioneered an educational process where kids from different economic and social sections of society study, play and share together as equals. Empathy, the emotional capacity to feel for, and with another, is at the core of the process and is internalized rather than taught.

Soon after she became the principal of the Loreto Sealdah - a girls' school with pupils predominantly from middle class backgrounds - Sister Cyril began introducing a series of leveling ideas. In the first year itself, she initiated the admission of a growing number of non-fee-paying, underprivileged children.

Her Rainbow project, launched in 1985, is a school within a school and is designed to cope with thousands of street children who cannot attend school. Rainbow children are taught on a one-on-one basis by the "regular" students - of class V upwards - and each class has two periods allotted per week for this.

Another program, Outreach, comprises weekly visits by Loreto Sealdah students aged 10 years and above, to village schools where they become the "teachers" for their counterparts in these schools. With such innovative, often radical strategies, this dynamic educationalist has helped the school evolve into a center for community development.

The Barefoot Training Programme is the most recent development in this history of leveling ideas. The seeds of the program were sown in 1988 when Sister Cyril was approached by teachers of an adivasi (tribal) group from Midnapur District of West Bengal, seeking practical advice on teaching methods that would be effective in their own environment.

Most of all, each child is made to feel precious. Sister Cyril believes that each child must value themselves in order to value in each other; "Even if a child is punished for a transgression, she or he gets a hug before going home. The message is clear: you were punished for your bad deed, but the hug is for the good person that you are!"