Sachin Tendulkar grew up in a two-room flat in Bandra East, Mumbai. His father was a professor who barely had enough money to help a neighborhood newspaper boy pay for college but did it anyway. That detail has stayed with Tendulkar. Since 2009, through the Mumbai-based nonprofit Apnalaya, his foundation has quietly sponsored the education of more than 200 underprivileged children every year — not as a PR exercise, but as a debt repaid.

Cricket, Poverty and a Billion Watching

India’s poverty rate stands at 21.9%, with nearly 195 million people still undernourished — the largest such population in the world. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Cricket is the country’s most consumed cultural product, its players the most recognized faces on the planet. That collision — extraordinary influence meeting extraordinary need — is creating something unexpected: a generation of sporting icons using fame as a development tool.

Research consistently shows that each additional year of schooling can increase an individual’s earnings by up to 10%. These Indian cricketers’ charity seem to understand that better than most policy documents do.

5 Players 5 Different Bets on the Future

Virat Kohli’s foundation, established in 2013, partnered with the Raah Foundation on Project Nutrition for Transformation — a year-long nutritional food supply to 5,000 malnourished tribal children across 103 health centers in Maharashtra. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates 4.7 million tribal children in India suffer from chronic nutrition deprivation, with 80% concentrated in just eight states. UNICEF Kohli’s project targeted the most deprived group within that already-deprived population.

Gautam Gambhir took a different approach. In Delhi’s West Patel Nagar, he launched Community Kitchen No. 1 under his foundation with a single declared mission: no one should sleep hungry. The kitchen grew into four Jan Rasoi canteens serving approximately 4,000 meals a day at Re 1 per plate — a token amount charged, Gambhir said, so people could eat with dignity rather than charity.

Suresh Raina and his wife Priyanka launched the Gracia Raina Foundation to address a quieter crisis — the reproductive and mental health of underprivileged women and girls. The foundation runs adolescent health workshops in government schools and a RightAGE program targeting girls in underserved communities, tackling the generational poverty cycle at a point most interventions miss entirely.

Then there is Yuvraj Singh — perhaps the most personal story of all. After surviving a rare form of cancer following the 2011 World Cup, Yuvraj launched the YouWeCan Foundation. To date it has screened more than 140,000 people in early detection camps, counseled 24,000 men on tobacco cessation and sponsored the complete school education of 150 cancer survivor children from below-poverty-line families. At a London fundraiser in July 2025 — attended by Tendulkar, Kohli, Brian Lara and the entire Indian national squad — Yuvraj put it plainly: “I know what it feels like to wake up unsure of your tomorrow.”

Personal Generosity vs. Structural Change

Indian cricketers’ charity is not a one-off charity event. They are sustained, targeted investments in specific communities — nutrition, education, health care, dignity — by people who grew up understanding what their absence means. Furthermore, they are making poverty visible to a billion-person audience that idolizes them. They are modeling a version of success that includes obligation. And in communities where government services have consistently failed to arrive, they are arriving instead.

– Parthivee Mukherji

Parthivee is based in Edinburgh, UK and focuses on Celebs for The Borgen Project.

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