International Women’s Day: Meet Khushboo Awasthi, a key face in ‘mission’ to transform India’s 1 million govt schools

International Women’s Day: The public education system of India cannot be fixed overnight but needs small, incremental changes to achieve tangible goals, says Khushboo Awasthi, the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of ShikshaLokam, a non-profit working on the education leadership development mission.

ShikshaLokam works with the Department of School Education in different states and Union government institutions towards designing school improvement and leadership development programs.

Khushboo is also the co-founder of Mantra4Change, a non-profit driving systemic public schools transformation in the Indian education system. She is a member of the working committee of the National Mentoring Mission constituted by the National Council for Teacher Education.

In conversation with Mint on International Women’s Day, Khusboo, with over 15+ years of experience in the education sector, speaks about India’s public education system and how a ‘public movement’ bringing together different stakeholders is seeking to transform India’s one million public schools.

Mint caught up with Khusboo on the sidelines of InvokED 4.0, India’s largest education leadership dialogue, organised by ShikshaLokam in Bengaluru on March 7-8. Here are the edited excerpts from the interview:

How did the idea of SikshaLokam and come to you?

I am an engineer from Bihar. While working at Wipro and Honeywell many years ago, I realised that whatever I was able to do was due to my education. I and my then my friend and now husband (Santosh) realised that we should do something for education. So, at that point in 2013 we started Mantra4Change, a non-profit driving systemic public schools transformation in the Indian education system. The whole idea is how to make sure that kids who come from marginalized sections of society get a good education.

Then in 2017, we started working with the government. We thought of expanding our work into a movement across 1 million public schools of the country. We started ShikshaLokam – a non-profit working on the education leadership development mission. The idea was to provide a common technology platform with ministry of education through a programme called Diksha – the ‘national digital infrastructure for teachers.’

You speak about Shikshagraha. Tell us about it?

While we worked with different partners with different contextual knowledge, we thought of solving the problem by developing an ecosystem. At present we are working with about 150 organisations in 20 states associated with ShikshaLokam. And then last year we decided to launch what we call a public movement – ‘Shikshagraha’. We though when we can have a Satyagraha for freedom movement why not a Shikshagraha for a movement in education.

‘Shikshagraha’ isn’t just a platform, it is not registered, But it provides a thriving environment where the co-creation of need-based solutions becomes a reality. Any organisation can work with this collective. The unique aspect is that earlier we used to work with just government organisations. But today there are small grassroot organisations like self help groups who have joined us.

How does Shikshagraha work?

It is basically a collective of organisations. It’s like a ladder in which you take one step at a time. Each organisation is unique and works in its own way. If I am ShikshaLokam, my team will work with government in Delhi. Mantra4Change and Piramal Foundation work in state on thing like programme designing in Rajasthan, for example.

Our aim to tap the strengths of different organizations and officials working in different areas of the country. Today, we are working in 20 states including Meghalaya, Nagaland, Jammu and Kashmir, etc. There are places where we found a government official in education department is proactive and then there are places where a partner organization is doing a good job. A partner like EduView works on early childhood. Then ultimately, we find funders who are ready to collaborate for the collective that has worked.

Basically, we are unlocking three things – government partnerships, leveraging technology and funding. Tribal districts of Odisha are getting funded from Axis Bank in Bombay.

How have things changed on the ground?

Ever since we started working with government the idea is to bring change in micro steps. We will see changes overnight. The idea is to work through micro improvements. Today if you look at Diksha dashboard, there are about 10 lakh micro improvements have been recorded from across 20 states. 

Each teachers shares its micro improvements. Xavier Chandra Kumar, a school leader, led the holistic transformation of Vallalar Government Higher Secondary School, Villupuram, Tamil Nadu, for example, helped tackle problem of drugs in the school. If these micro improvements increase, it means schools are improving.

Four years ago, we realized that while we were working, we need to focus on leadership. While we were working with partners and government, we found there was no focus on leadership. We began ‘invoked’ in 2021 to find if can we catalyse dialogue on leadership and importance of leadership. Today invoked has evolved as a space where global partners are coming and taking part in exchange of ideas.

The government of India’s secretary of education (Sanjay Kumar), education secretaries from six states are here for this two-day event. The idea is to see how all these stakeholders – government, NGO’s and philanthrophy organisations work together.