Chaitra Murlidhar

As a 24-year-old, in 2008, I took a life-altering decision to give up my job as an engineer in a multi-national corporation to begin a new life – to teach Grade 2 children in an under-resourced, low-cost school in Pune city in Western India.  What led me to this decision was the unease I felt about not responding to the many issues facing our society, and an urge to do something meaningful. From my schooling years I was aware of poverty, as my army officer father’s frequent postings took us to some of the most desolate parts of the country. During my two-year stint in a plush office building that shared a wall with one of Pune’s largest slums, the disparities of the world I lived in became disturbingly clear. Instead of being an armchair analyst and critic of Indian reality, I decided to be part of the solution.  

During those two years as a school teacher spent with little children from the neighboring slums, I experienced the terrible reality of educational inequity in India: in a system where the quality of education depends on how much the parent can afford to pay, in most cases, a child’s background unfortunately dictates what she should become.

These two years also opened my eyes to the enormous potential in every child. It was a revelation when we could help children with almost zero reading fluency, read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and eventually get them to stage an 80-minute musical based on the book. That event, and our year-long theatre, dance and arts clubs for which resources were raised through crowdsourcing platforms also taught me the immense power of collaboration – with parents of students and colleagues, with distant well- wishers over the Internet, and local bureaucrats.

These two years made me think that if my work touched the lives of 36 children in a class, it was exciting to imagine the ripples of change we could set off in a chain of schools in a city or the entire country.  My grass-root experience told me that any relevant educational reform depends on teachers and their development. Equity in education can be achieved only when public education system delivers high quality. So, in 2012, I joined Thermax Foundation (TF), which had been running a few schools in partnership with the government since 2007 and was seriously exploring ways to raise the level of education for Pune city. The job description – to establish a teacher training program for public school educators – mirrored my own desire to influence capacity building of teachers at the city level.