All thanks to these maverick individuals, who have used Education to breakthrough obstacles in the society. Let’s have a look at some of them:
Shantanu Prakash
The founder of the digital education firm Educomp Solutions, Shantanu Prakash revolutionized the Indian education sector through his technology-led learning approach. The foundation of his venture was based on addressing the pain points in the existing education system. He realized that the education sector was facing a fundamental challenge, which was — how can you make children learn better?
In his attempt to address the shortcomings, Prakash came up with the concept of ‘smart learning’. He started at a time when technology had just made inroads into India and leveraged it to the core. In the following years, Educomp Solutions went on to reach over 30 million learners in 65,000 Indian schools.
It has empowered the teachers with advanced teaching aid, which facilitates effective learning among students. Shantanu Prakash has also made significant contribution to foster an effective ecosystem for refugee entrepreneurship through his company RVentures Foundation.
Byju Raveendran
The co-founder of BYJU’S, the Education Technology app with over 5.5 million downloads and 250,000 paid users. It was when Raveendran was teaching for entrance exams that he realised that students were not learning their fundamentals at the school level. Thus, in his attempt to foster innovation in learning, Raveendran made it accessible, effective, engaging and personalized for students. His venture was mainly aimed at helping the CAT aspirants crack the exam by understanding the concepts behind the questions.
Emerging as a giant in the Indian education technology space, Byju’s is today sponsored by Mark Zuckerberg and even talked about in Harvard. It is also one of the best funded education start-ups in the country. It was with an unprecedented zeal to transform the nature of learning that Raveendran brought Byju’s so far, and not just yet another test prep provider.
Kailash Satyarthi
Nobel Peace Prize winner Kailash Satyarthi is a human rights activist from India who used education as a means to end child slavery and exploitation of child labour. In his attempt to transform the victims into leaders and liberators, Satyarthi established three rehabilitation-cum-educational centres for freed bonded children.
Over the years, he has rescued more than 80,000 children, through the medium of education and rehabilitation. Satyarthi has also set up the single largest network for the most exploited children, the Global March against Child Labour. He has a major contribution in the movement for Right to Education law for free compulsory education to children.
Gaurav Munjal
The founder of Unacademy, marketed as India’s largest learning platform, Munjal offers a rather different take on this list of education pioneers. Currently, on a growth streak of 75% per month, Unacademy raised their second round of investment from Blume Ventures, along with big tech names Sachin Bansal, Binny Bansal, Vijay Shekhar Sharma.
Starting out from a YouTube channel in his third year of college, Munjal roped in Roman Saini and Hemesh Singh as co-founders to build a revolutionary free education platform with thousands of free lessons.
