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Rukmini Banerji is the CEO of the Pratham Education Foundation, India’s and the world’s largest education NGO. Rukmini has been with Pratham since 1996 and has extensive field experience in program design implementation in both rural and urban settings. She also led Pratham’s research and assessment activities, including the groundbreaking ASER report from 2005 to 2014.
In this episode, we sit down with Rukmini to discuss India’s post-pandemic priorities for the future of education.
India is the world’s second-most populous country and is projected to overtake China in just four years to become the world’s most populous country with 1.45 billion people. India already has the world’s largest school-age population: around 250 million children aged between 5-15. That’s 20% of the world’s total and to put that figure further into perspective, the equivalent figure for China is around 170 million.
How India will cope with the education fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic will have profound implications not just for the lives of a significant population of the world’s young, but for the world as a whole given the important role India plays and will play in the supply of skilled labor.
Read the ASER 2020 Wave 1 report: pratham.org/2020/10/28/aser-2020-wave-1-findings/
Follow Pratham: twitter.com/Pratham_India
Follow Andrew Jack: twitter.com/AJack
Subscribe to the Financial Times: ft.com/education