The hashtag is believed to have been started by former actress and author Twinkle Khanna who shared a picture from her school days while tweeting that two in five girls in India never graduate from high school.
Khanna then nominated other top Bollywood celebrities to raise awareness about health, education, and the worrying gender disparity among poorer kids in India.
Khanna's husband, superstar actor Akshay Kumar, then got all nostalgic, tweeting a picture of his younger self working out in the gym.
The B-Town hunk stated that while he had the privilege of nutritious home-cooked meals, around 1.17 million children in India cannot afford a meal.
Other Bollywood celebrities then started tweeting about their childhood privileges. Many stars of tinsel town used the hashtag #WhyTheGap to talk about the need to help out underprivileged kids who don’t enjoy the same privileges as they did.
According to reports, India has 472 million people aged below 18, but just half of them continue in school after the age of 14. The 2011 census said that there were 10.13 million child labourers in the country aged between 5 and 14. The report also noted that India has more than 4.5 million girls under the age of 15 who are married with children.
The government run Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) report of 2015 said that 19.8 million Indian children below the age of 6 are undernourished.