Veerni Sansthan

The Veerni Project is registered in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India, as a non-governmental organization (NGO) called Veerni Sansthan. The organization's mission is to provide secondary education to girls from rural Indian communities, thereby creating viable socio-economic alternatives to child marriage and enabling women to make independent life choices.

Jacqueline de Chollet, a Swiss woman, founded the Veerni Project in 1993, with an initial objective of providing family planning, medical, and nutritional education programs for women living in rural villages in the Thar Desert. After building relationships with village communities throughout the 1990s, the Veerni Project piloted a tutor-based program for girls in 2000, shifting the organization's focus towards women's secondary education. In 2004, Veerni adopted a new educational model; rather than bringing tutors into villages, the project began funding village girls' attendance at private secondary schools in the city of Jodhpur and providing lodging in a nearby boarding hostel.

Since 2005, under the direction of Mahendra Sharma, the Veerni Institute has operated a boarding hostel in Jodhpur where 75-90 girls live at a time. In addition to attending classes, girls participate in academic tutoring, career counseling, health camps, and self defense training, as well as art, sewing, language, and computer classes, and are encouraged to consider pursuing a college education after graduation. A significant portion of Veerni's students at any time are already child brides. In exchange for the free lodging and tuition Veerni provides, their parents must sign a pledge promising to delay sending girls to their husbands until they have at least completed secondary school. Since 2012, Veerni has also run an after-school literacy program in Meghwalon ki Dhanki, a village where girls were struggling to pass entrance exams for the Veerni Institute. The Veerni Institute receives applications from more girls than it can accept each year, leading the organization to found a second boarding hostel in Jodhpur, called Veerni Balika, which opened in July 2019.

The Veerni Project is funded by family foundations and individuals in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including the Global Foundation for Humanity, Fondation Veerni, and the Association du Projet Veerni. Director Mahendra Sharma has led Veerni since 2005, and the organization has an all-Indian board and staff.