Nandan, along with his wife, Rohini, Founder of Arghyam Foundation, co-founded Ekstep Foundation, a digital platform for education that aims to address learning challenges in the primary education space. On the topic ‘Realising a Billion Aspirations’, the duo spoke about how digital platforms will give telemetry of the content in education.

Digital technology can rapidly transform how countries provide services such as education and health to their citizens. The public services of the future should be effective, efficient, fair, data-driven, and responsive to individual needs. And the groundwork to turn this vision into reality needs to be laid now. Data can be the key. 

Every child deserves education as a fundamental right in this country. But even today, we are not able to guarantee that right for all the children in India. We realise how complex it is to achieve even this basic goal of creating sustainable social change in the field of education. But we are taking what we have learnt and building on that in 2020.

Disruption wrought by COVID-19 is different. We have transitioned to a world that needs to coexist with this unpredictable threat. In these times, our schools must quickly respond to the breakdowns. However, a response is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to get ahead of the curve, we need to reimagine our schools as resilient systems.

In a conversation with Founding Fuel’s podcast series Virtuoso, hosted by Anna Assisi, Shankar Maruwada, CEO of EkStep Foundation traces the journey of EkStep and distills some of the key lessons for entrepreneurs and builders. As someone said, you can't put 20,000 ants together and create an elephant. 

In its wisdom, the state has recently banned all online teaching for classes 1-5. The state comes with honourable intentions. The arguments being made are on the grounds of equity, public health and learning. The equity argument is that online learning necessitates reliable access to digital devices, which not all children have.

Societal Platform Thinking posits a reimagining of social change through a systemic approach that brings the government, society and the market together. It is based on the following elements: shared infrastructure; co-creating in context: network of networks; minimalistic design; and empowerment through data.