Ei Dialogues

In this episode, Pranav Kothari is in conversation with Seema Bansal, Partner and Director at Boston Consulting Group. Seema leads BCG's Social Impact practice in Asia Pacific and is a member of the firm's People & Organization and Public Sector Practices. In the conversation, Seema and Pranav talk about the role of consultants in India's development journey. Using the example of school merger...

In this episode, Pranav Kothari was in conversation with Vineet Nayar, Founder-Chairman of Sampark Foundation. Vineet is also the former CEO of HCL Technologies, and the author of the acclaimed management book Ëmployees First, Customers Second . Sampark Foundation hopes to catalyse innovation-led social change to impact the education of 20 million children by 2025.  In this episode, Vineet an...

In this episode, Pranav Kothari spoke to Rathish Balakrishnan, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Sattva Consulting. Sattva is a development consultancy firm motivated by the vision of ending poverty in our lifetime. Rathish and Pranav talked about ways to strengthen India's social sector through innovative funding methods like Development Impact Bonds, value-based funding, the Social Stock Exchan...

In this episode of Ei Dialogues, we speak to Dr. Rukmini Banerji, CEO of Pratham Education Foundation. Pratham works to improve learning outcomes through high-quality, low-cost, and replicable interventions, and is world-renowned for its Annual Status of Education Report. Dr. Banerji spoke about how Pratham helped children learn during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the growing importance of parents i...

In this episode of EI Dialogues we speak to Aditya Natraj, Director of the Kaivalya Education Foundation. KEF works to improve public education in India by developing leadership among school, district, and state officials. In this conversation, Aditya Natraj spoke about KEF's philosophy of leadership and it's application in the education sector, as well as the need for equity between private...

In this episode of EI Dialogues, we speak to Dr. Santhosh Matthew, the Country Lead, Public Policy and Finance at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). BMGF works to improve people’s health and lift them out of hunger and extreme poverty. Dr. Santhosh Matthew also has extensive experience as a civil servant and a Ph. D. in Development Studies. In this conversation, he spoke about his...

In this episode of EI Dialogues, we talk to Ashish Dhawan, founder of the Central Square Foundation (CSF). CSF is a non-profit organization that works to make high-quality school education available to all children in India, and improve the learning outcomes of children, especially from low-income communities. Ashish Dhawan is also the founder of ChrysCapital and a founding member of Ashoka Univer...

In this episode of EI Dialogues, we talk to Saransh Vaswani, a co-founder of Saajha. Saajha works to build the capacity of School Management Committees (SMCs), which were mandated by the Right to Education Act. These SMCs comprise the school principal, a teacher, parents, a local ward councilor, and an educationist. Inspired by the potential of parent-teacher engagement, Saajha tries to create an...

In this episode of EI Dialogues, we interact with Prachi Jain Windlass. She is currently Director-India Education at the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF). In her role, Prachi leads the foundation’s efforts to improve the fast-growing affordable private schools sector and other high-quality market-based solutions for education in India. She is also on the board of several for-profit educati...

In this episode, we talk to Sridhar Rajagopalan, the President and Chief Learning Officer of Educational Initiatives. During the conversation, Sridhar talks about why he co-founded Educational Initiatives after running a school for 6 years, the idea behind doing Assessments and using EdTech for improving learning outcomes. He further tells us about the discipline of Science of Learning, what inves...

In this episode, we converse with Vishal Talreja, co-founder of Dream a Dream, an organisation working towards empowering children and young people from vulnerable backgrounds using a life-skills approach. An active writer on development challenges and human-interest stories, Vishal is an Ashoka Fellow, an Eisenhower Fellow, and a Board Member at PYE Global.  During the conversation, he share...

In this episode, we converse with Prof. Karthik Muralidharan, who is the head of global education research at JPAL. He is also the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). His research spans development, public, and labour economics with a focus on improving the effectiveness of public spending in the social sector. Here, Karthik breaks down for u...

In this episode, we converse with Anil Swarup. He is the Former Secretary of School Education and Literacy and comes from a long tenure in the civil services. In his career, he has been known to bring about a change in the way technology is used in governance, and has used social media extensively to advocate the #NexusOfGood movement, which identifies local heroes and homegrown solutions which ha...

In this episode of EI Dialogues, we have Dr. Dhir Jhingran in conversation with Pranav Kothari. He is the Founder Director of the Language and Learning Foundation. He has worked in the primary education sector for over two decades, within and outside the government. As an officer of the Indian Administrative Service, he served as Principal Secretary, Education with the Government of Assam and as D...

In this episode, we have Kruti Bharucha, the CEO of Peepul, in conversation with Pranav Kothari. Prior to Peepul, Kruti was Country Head for Ark India and led Ark India's work to pioneer PPP schools in Delhi as well as work with governments on improving governance and accountability systems on education. Kruti moved to the development space after working in the corporate sector for 19 years. The v...

In this episode, we listen to Parth Shah, President, Centre for Civil Society in conversation with Pranav Kothari, VP, Large Scale Education Programmes, at Educational Initiatives. Parth breaks down the basics of policymaking, some benevolent aspects of the RTE policy, and his views on the recent amendment on removing the no-detention clause. The conversation further steers towards democracy in po...

In this episode of EI Dialogues, Pranav Kothari converses with Amitav Virmani, the Founder CEO of The Education Alliance. Amitav talks to us about what is really meant by good quality education, how his organisation is creating effective partnerships by connecting governments with non-profits to leverage the strengths of both, and how they are creating a layer of accountability within the system f...

In this episode of EI Dialogues, we converse with Ramya Venkatraman, co-founder of Center for Teacher Accreditation (CENTA). During the conversation, Ramya shares about her passion for education, her journey from McKinsey & Co to CENTA, and CENTA's work and why we misunderstand the teaching profession. 

Vinod is the co-founder at TheTeacherApp,  a not-for-profit education technology startup that creates open-source, digital learning experiences for the professional development of teachers in low-resource schools of India. Vinod has been driving the conversation on collaboration in the development space with over 20 partners ranging from government, content creators, media production, and fun...

During the conversation, Ashok talks in-depth on building organisations that are scalable and sustainable. He also sheds light on his transition to the development space after spending 24-years in the corporate sector and his experiences with Akshara thereafter. Ashok Kamath has been Managing Trustee since 2003 and Chairman of Akshara Foundation since July 1, 2008. In April 2019, he has conferred...

Meeta Sengupta is a writer, speaker and advisor on education with a cross country perspective on policy, skills and pedagogies. She has written extensively on school systems and impact, pedagogies and processes, assessments and outcomes, teachers and leaders, and on education gaps and funding. During the conversation, Meeta elucidates on the role of educational research, India's participation and...

In this conversation, Dr. Pritchett provides a background about the challenges within education in the Indian context while explaining the importance of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) and sharing instances from education research. He also elaborates on the concept of RCTs, including when and how they can be adapted to the field of development economics, and to what extent policymakers sh...

Neelima Khetan is former Group CSR head of Vedanta Ltd. Prior to joining HZL, she was the Director-CSR and Sustainability for Coca Cola in India and South-West Asia. During the conversation, she shares her 25-year long journey at Seva Mandir, and the consequent transition to the CSR department in the for-profit sector. Furthermore, she sheds some light on how to build synergies between the for-pro...

Sourav Banerjee is the Country Director of Room to Read. In this episode, he gives us a birds-eye view on the evolution of the Indian education system and the education governance landscape. The discussion then moves to the issue of multi-language literacy in India, where a child is often caught up in transitioning from home language, to market language, to state language, to English. The conversa...

Akshay is a Teacher-Entrepreneur with a passion for helping build organizations that create an equitable world. Through Avanti, he has helped teachers in 11 states across India transform Math and Science learning outcomes for India's 100M middle and high-school students through the use of collaborative learning and technology.   Akshay candidly speaks about his Swades moment that motivat...