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Madhav Chavan
Dr Madhav Chavan is a co-founder and CE-President of Pratham, an organisation that reaches 3 million primary school age children in India every year.
He acquired a Ph.D. in chemistry at the Ohio State University in the US in 1983 and returned to India in 1986 after his post-doctoral work at the University of Houston. In 1989, while teaching at the University of Mumbai, he started mass scale work for adult literacy in the slums of Mumbai as a part of the National Literacy Mission in the slums of Mumbai. In 1994, as a result of an initiative of UNICEF in Mumbai, Pratham was set up to address problems of universal primary education in Mumbai. Dr. Chavan has since then led the development of the organisation and its programmes. Pratham has several mass-scale innovations such as the Annual Status of Education Report in the area of assessment and the Read India movement in the delivery of education for the underprivileged to its credit.
Pratham has been recognised by the Kravis Prize and the Skoll Award for its innovativeness and leadership as a social entrepreneurial organisation in the area of education. Madhav Chavan was recently awarded the WISE Prize for Education instituted by the Qatar Foundation at the World Innovation Summit for Education, which is equated with a “Nobel for work done in education”.
Dr Chavan is a creative individual who has anchored television shows, written songs about human rights and women’s rights. He enjoys working out creative ways to educate or train children and youth. He finds time to work on challenges of teaching while balancing his duties as the CEO of a big organisation.
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The push and pull of skilling
Vocational training has been centre-stage in policy discussions in India over the past decade. This article discusses the perspectives of and dissatisfaction among the four groups of stakeholders in skill training – government, industry, trainers and potential trainees. It highlights the need for a strong “pull” or demand for training and suggests innovative ways to achieve this.
Old habits and new norms
As schools reopen and memories of the pandemic fade, Madhav Chavan takes stock of practices and ideas that have become the ‘new normal’. He highlights the increase in enrollment and absence of learning loss among children over the last few years, and the role that parents and the community played in aiding children’s learning efforts. He sees the pandemic-induced closures as an opportunity to learn from how the school system coped with the challenge and created new pedagogical norms.