The Story So Far
The Story So Far
I grew up believing that education happened in classrooms—that learning required desks, blackboards, and someone with the authority to teach. It took years of unlearning, and the wisdom of communities I met along the way, to understand how limited that belief was.
The Formal Path
My academic journey was conventional. I pursued Biotechnology at Mumbai University, completing my Bachelor’s degree in 2022 and Master’s in 2024. The sciences taught me rigor—how to observe, hypothesize, test, and iterate. These are skills I still carry, though I apply them now to human systems rather than biological ones.
But something was stirring even then. Between lab reports and examinations, I kept returning to a question that formal education couldn’t quite answer: Why do so many children in our neighborhoods lose their natural love of learning by the time they finish school?
“The real tragedy isn’t that children fail in school. It’s that school fails to see what children are capable of.
The Turning Point
The answer didn’t come from a textbook. It came from spending time in communities— watching children teach each other games, seeing how grandmothers passed down knowledge through stories, observing the natural curiosity that flourishes when no one is trying to measure it.
I began to see that the problem wasn’t a lack of intelligence or potential in children from underserved communities. The problem was that our formal systems couldn’t recognize or nurture the kind of learning that happens naturally, organically, within the fabric of community life.
The Experiment Begins
ApniPathshala started not as an organization, but as a question: What if we stopped trying to bring education to communities and instead helped communities recognize the education already happening within them?
The first POD was small—just a handful of children gathering in a neighbor’s home. There was no curriculum, no grades, no formal teacher. Just adults who cared and children who were curious. What we witnessed in those early days changed everything I thought I knew about learning.
Children who had been labeled “slow learners” in school became animated storytellers. Teenagers who had dropped out became mentors to younger children. Parents who had felt excluded from their children’s education became active participants in the learning process.
“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
— John Dewey
The Experiment Begins
Today, as CEO of ApniPathshala Foundation, I work with an incredible team to support over 130 community learning PODs across Maharashtra. But I’ve never forgotten that my role is not to lead this movement—it’s to serve it.
The real leaders are the community mothers who open their homes for children to learn. The retired teachers who volunteer their evenings. The young people who return to their neighborhoods to give back. My job is simply to connect, support, and amplify what they’re already doing.
I’m based in Mumbai, but this work has taken me to villages and urban settlements across the state. Each community teaches me something new about what learning can look like when we trust people to lead their own transformation.