Since 2002 White Lotus has been partnering Spirit in Life Movement to implement a program known as the Buddha Smiles program.

The program provides evening classes for more than 500 children from tribal villages and quarry and weaving labor, in rural villages outside of Vellore in Tamil Nadu. These classes open up new vistas these children, quite brutalized and living without any cultural or arts programs, with inspirational stories and biographies of great leaders of India such as Mahatma Gandhi and his philosophies of non violence as a social change agent.

Over the years we have also encouraged our partners that originated and implement the program, Spirit In Life Community, to extend the objectives of the program to include RTE and interact with the formal schools to better socialize these children facing exclusion and prejudice from the village communities their schools are located in. Achieving better learning outcomes for children of illiterate migrant labour is also one of the main objectives of the program which provides extra tuition on subjects of the formal schools curriculum as much as possible on an individual basis as required by the students of various classes.