2023 Robert M. Duncan Alumni Citizenship Award

I was inspired by the National Literacy Mission launched by the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who appealed to people to make India a literate country within a decade. I found that highly motivating. One of the mission’s core messages was that the government can’t make people literate; people must make themselves literate.

My greatest accomplishment is the organization I co-founded, Pratham, which helps millions of children learn literacy and numeracy skills each year. We’ve contributed to the field of children’s literacy and numeracy by devising a metric for measuring learning levels which is now the gold standard in India. And we created a simple method to teach literacy and numeracy skills that is known worldwide as Teaching at the Right Level. My work is gratifying. I’ve had the opportunity to work with people young and old, very rich and extremely poor, celebrities and unknown people.

My advisor, Professor Daryle H. Busch, taught me two key things. First, that facts must be separated from fiction. In the developmental sector, people tend to jump to conclusions about causes before understanding facts. Learning to keep facts separate from feelings was invaluable. Second, I learned how to trust people. It may be a common practice in American universities to put a student in charge of expensive equipment, but for someone from India, it was a completely new experience. Professor Busch trusted his students to do the right thing, which made us responsible for our actions and gave us the freedom to act.

I like to take pictures and make movies, and I also like to sing. In fact, my friends at Ohio State and I had a semi-professional Indian music and entertainment group.