Speakers

Anurag Behar, CEO, Azim Premji Foundation

Anurag Behar is CEO of Azim Premji Foundation and the founding Vice Chancellor of Azim Premji University. Anurag is a member of the Committee that has developed India’s National Education Policy (2019), the first comprehensive education policy for the country since 1986. He has been deeply engaged with efforts to improve education in India, for the past seventeen years. He has also been a vocal advocate for the critical importance of public systems, in particular the public education system. Anurag has earlier played leadership roles in business. He continues to provide oversight to the social and ecological initiatives of the Wipro Group.

Arvind Sardana, Former Director, Eklavya

Arvind Sardana has been a long-standing member of the social science group at Eklavya. He has also been associated with curriculum development initiatives at NCERT and various state governments over the past two decades.

Ashish Kothari, Co-founder, Kalpavriksh

Founder-member of Indian environmental group Kalpavriksh, Ashish taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA), coordinated India's Biodiversity Strategy & Action Plan process, was on Greenpeace International & India Boards, and helps coordinate Vikalp Sangam and Global Tapestry of Alternatives.

Atanu Sain, Deputy Director, Vikramshila Education Resource Society

Atanu Sain has been working in the field of elementary education for the last thirty years. Teacher education, content creation, resource development, education planning and management are his core areas of interest. He has been working on ‘Foundational Literacy and Numeracy’ in different states in India and helping them towards implementing National Education Policy 2020 and the NIPUN Bharat Mission. He has experience in textbook development and the review of foundational numeracy resources as well. As Deputy Director of Vikramshila Education Resource Society, he has been participating in different National and State level forums and platforms. He has published several articles on education in different journals and newspapers.

Chitra Ravi Founder & CEO, Chrysalis (EZ Vidya) Pvt Ltd

Chitra Ravi is an educational visionary who has spent the last two decades building a community and developing solutions to bring a fundamental change in the education system. In 2001, she founded Chrysalis, a state-of-the-art educational research and innovation organization with a vision to awaken the innate human potential in every child. She underwent a training program on ‘Views of Understanding,’ conducted by Harvard Graduate School of Education. Stanford Graduate School of Business, USA, handpicked Chitra among 60 entrepreneurs across India to be a part of their SEED Transformation Program 2019. Under her leadership, Chrysalis has been conferred prestigious awards including the ET-NOW ‘Game-Changer’ award from over 63,000 companies which were nominated.

Gurleen Malhotra, Member, Jodo Gyan

Gurleen is a Member of Jodo Gyan, a not-for-profit social organization with over two decades of successful experiences in supporting schools across the country in mathematics education. These methods are based on the premise that children learn when they are engaged in activities that are meaningful to them. They also currently work extensively with government school systems in multiple states.

Hriday Kant (Hardy) Dewan, Lead, Translations Initiative, Azim Premji University

Hriday Kant Dewan (Hardy) has been closely associated with Azim Premji Foundation right from the early days and leads the Translations Initiative at the Foundation, among other responsibilities. As a key member of Eklavya, he contributed to the teacher capacity building in the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Project (HSTP) and developed various resources for teachers. Hardy has since been working in teacher development, textbook development and elementary education for the last 35 years, with various NGOs, Governmental Education Programs, State Governments and GoI’s Ministry of Education. He continues to devote his energies for systemic improvements in our public education system.

Kiran Bhatty, Senior Visiting Fellow, Centre for Policy Research

Kiran researches governance issues in elementary education, working to build systems of transparency, accountability, and community monitoring. She has focused, in particular, on developing a methodology for conducting social audits of the Right To Education Act (RTE) Act that includes finding local solutions through greater engagement with the lower-level bureaucracy. Kiran has served as an education expert on a range of national and international projects, including the committees that established the guidelines for merging the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) with RTE. She currently serves on the Advisory Committee for Data and Management Systems at National University for Education Planning and Administration (NUEPA). She is also involved with various civil society initiatives such as Right to Food Campaign, National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, and Indian Association of Women’s Studies.

Rahul Mukhopadhyay, Visiting Faculty, Azim Premji University

Rahul Mukhopadhyay is a visiting faculty with the School of Education, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, and a guest faculty for the Masters in Elementary Education program at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. He is also involved with the Field Research team of Azim Premji Foundation and with Wipro Foundation’s work in education in East and North-East India.

Rishikesh B S, Professor and Associate Director, School of Education, Azim Premji University

Rishikesh teaches at the School of Education, Azim Premji University. He also leads the Hub for Education, Law & Policy located at the University. His research interests are in the domains of educational policies, assessments and teacher education. Over the last couple of years, education policy related issues have formed the core of Rishikesh’s work. He is on various Government Advisory Committees on issues concerning education. He currently serves as a member of the Technical Secretariat Group constituted by Ministry of Education, Government of India, to assist the development of the National Curriculum Framework.

Shabnam Virmani, Artist in Residence at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology

Shabnam Virmani initiated the Kabir Project journeys in 2002. Since then, she has been exploring the philosophy of Kabir and other mystics through a deep engagement with their oral folk traditions. Her inspiration and joy in this poetry and its wisdom has taken the shape of documentary films and a digital archive, singing and performing, translations and curations, urban festivals and rural yatras, and more recently, infecting students with the challenge and wonder of mystic poetry. All this is part of her work at the Kabir Project in Srishti, Bengaluru. Earlier, she has worked on gender issues through journalism, video and radio work in the community.

Sreekanth Sreedharan, Co-Founder, NLightN Education

Sreekanth has worked in the area of Education for the last 13 years. His experience spanned work in CSR, civil society, program management and direct work at the grassroots with government teachers. He is currently working on setting up and scaling an EdTech organization that aims to provide Foundational Education to all adults who missed the opportunity during their school days. His vision is to utilize the power of technology and distributed tutoring resources available across India to ensure that every adult Indian has Foundational Education as envisioned in India’s National Educational Policy 2020.

Suhel Quader, Senior Scientist, Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF)

Suhel Quader believes that children (and adults) flourish and thrive best when they immerse themselves in the beauty and diversity of the natural world. Although trained as an ecologist, he now spends most of his time thinking about how to ensure that children do not lose their inherent love of the wild creatures around them; and how to rekindle this love in adults who have lost that connection. Suhel works with NCF in Bengaluru.

Ujjwal Bannerjee, Senior Program Manager, HT Parekh Foundation

Ujjwal has been working in the space of education for 15 years now, after transitioning from the corporate sector. Prior to joining HT Parekh Foundation, at Tata Trusts he was involved in leading implementation of education work for the state of Gujarat, other than anchoring projects in select states across various themes on early childhood education as well as elementary education. His journey in education led him to work with education NGOs, as well as private service providing companies, and has allowed him to engage with education ideas from various vantage points.

Vijay Mahajan, CEO, Rajiv Gandhi Foundation

Vijay Mahajan co-founded and was the CEO of PRADAN (1982-87), an NGO which has promoted the livelihoods of over two million poor households. In 1996, Vijay co-founded and was the CEO (1996-2016), of Basix Social Enterprise Group, which has supported over five million poor households through microfinance and livelihood promotion services. In 1999, Vijay co-founded Sa-Dhan with Ela Bhatt; and in 2009, Microfinance Institutions Network (MFIN) with other MFI leaders. He is a graduate of IIT Delhi (1975), post-graduate of IIM Ahmedabad (1981) and a mid-career fellow of Princeton University (1989). He was selected among 60 outstanding social entrepreneurs of the world at World Economic Forum, Davos, in 2003. Since 2018, Vijay is the CEO of Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.