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Editorial : Profile

Name Surname

Rukmini Banerji

Pratham

Dr. Rukmini Banerji is the CEO of Pratham Education Foundation. Trained as an economist, Dr. Banerji completed her B.A. at St. Stephen’s College and attended the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Banerji worked as a programme officer at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago for several years before returning to India in 1996 to join Pratham as part of the leadership team. There, she led the organisation’s research and assessment efforts, which have included the internationally acknowledged Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) since 2005, and served as director of the ASER Centre in New Delhi for 10 years.

In 2008, she was the inaugural recipient of the Maulana Abul Kalam Shiksha Puraskar Award conferred by the Government of Bihar, India. Over the years, she has represented Pratham and ASER Centre in various national and international forums and is a member of committees both in India and abroad. She writes frequently on education in India and enjoys creating books and stories for children.

Originally from Bihar, she now lives in New Delhi.

Posts by Rukmini Banerji

Tracking learning outcomes: ASER’s work through the pandemic

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns, schools quickly pivoted to online learning. However, there was limited information about whether children had access to learning m...

Tracking learning outcomes: ASER’s work through the pandemic

With the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns, schools quickly pivoted to online learning. However, there was limited information about whether children had access to learning m...

Covid-19 and schooling: 2020 experience and way forward

The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic brought with it significant challenges for the education sector. On the one hand, closing schools meant imposing a heavy cost on a whole generation of students, and ...

Banerjee and Duflo’s journey with Pratham

This year’s economics Nobel laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have worked closely with education NGO Pratham in India for more than 20 years. Over time, this unique partnership of research...

Building foundations well: The challenge for primary education

Rukmini Banerji contends that the draft New Education Policy gets it right in emphasising the importance of Early Childhood Care and Education and the need to urgently work on establishing foundationa...

ASER 2018: Behind the headlines

Thanks to more than a decade of Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER), the main headlines from the surveys are widely known – the learning levels of Indian school going children are worryingly l...

Teaching at the right level: Solutions for low learning levels in India

At least half of all children in India have not acquired basic literacy and arithmetic skills by the end of primary school. In this article, Rukmini Banerji of Pratham and J-PAL Director Esther Duflo...

Introduction to e-Symposium: Ideas for reforms in education policy in India

A New Education Policy is being formulated in India based on a time-bound grassroots consultative process. As a contribution to the discussions, Rukmini Banerji of the education NGO Pratham and Ashok...

Building a movement, assessment to action

While citizen-led assessments of children’s learning have been applauded for building awareness around the issue, observers have pointed out that information does not automatically galvanise action...

Taking education beyond educationists

ASER – Annual Status of Education Report – has been tracking learning outcomes of children in rural India for the past 10 years. In this note, Rukmini Banerji, Director of the ASER Centre/Pratham...

Choice and cost: The role of household decision making and spending on secondary education in rural Bihar

This project attempts to understand the educational choices that households make and expenditures they undertake for children going from upper primary school to secondary school in Bihar. It is design...

Improving children's learning: Challenges and priorities for the new government

Over the last 15 years, continued effort to universalise access to elementary education in India has resulted in high enrolment rates in schools. Now that most children are in school, policy and plan...