Every January, thousands of volunteers walk into villages across India carrying nothing more than a clipboard and a set of flashcards. They are not government inspectors. They knock on doors and ask children to read a paragraph or solve a subtraction sum, whether or not the child is enrolled in school. This is the Annual…
The Officer Behind the Right Every year, millions of Indian children walk into a neighbourhood school believing this is a rightguaranteed to them by law. That guarantee exists largely because of a civil servant who spent nearly 3 decades turning elementary education from a policy aspiration into a legal right. MsAnita Kaul (1954-2016) is a…
Six years after India tore up a 34-year-old education framework, classrooms look genuinely different — but the policy’s own funding target, learning deadline, and language formula remain unresolved. On July 29, 2020, the Union cabinet approved the National Education Policy 2020, based on recommendations from the Kasturirangan Committee, replacing a policy that has, for the…
Nasscom Foundation and IBM have partnered to equip 87,000 young people from underserved communities across India with digital, domain and employability skills. Through IBM SkillsBuild, the initiative focuses on connecting digital learning with real employment opportunities.
There are easier CSR initiatives than educating girls in India. You can build a toilet, install solar panels, plant trees, and satisfy before-and-after photographs and clear completion dates. Anand Mahindra chose something harder in 1996. He committed the Mahindra Group to ensuring that girls from the most economically disadvantaged communities would complete 10 years of…
She was 18, a college student in Mumbai, when she first walked into the city’s slums to teach. There was no organisation behind it, no fellowship, no grant. Just a young woman who had grown up in India and abroad and could not reconcile the world she had been given with the one child in…
On 17th March 2026, President Droupadi Murmu arrived at Rashtrapati Bhavan for an unusual ceremony. She was there to mark a number: 5 billion. The Akshaya Patra Foundation has served many mid-day meals to schoolchildren since its founding in Bengaluru in 2000, 1,500 children, 5 schools, and 1 kitchen. The journey has travelled from 1,500…
Rs. 2.3 lakh crore. The number is so large it loses meaning. Azim Premji has committed to philanthropy throughout his giving career. He transferred Wipro shares and publicly declared a pledge to give away most of his wealth. To put it in perspective, it is more than India’s total annual expenditure on education for several…
Most people at 21 are still deciding what to do with their degree. Tanuj Samaddar, at the same age, was already a two-time President’s Awardee, a published author, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, the CEO of a media house, and a Commonwealth Scholar. He was also running Action for a Resilient Tomorrow,…
New AISHE data by the Press Information Bureau show record growth in universities, enrolment and gender parity over the past decade — but faculty representation, caste and tribal proportionality, and disability access have not kept pace. India’s higher education system expanded faster in the decade to 2023-24 than in almost any comparable period since independence,…
