Ashish Dhawan, recipient of Rotary Club of Bombay’s PV Gandhi Award for Excellence in Public Life
I just thought I’d share a little bit of my own life’s journey, what shaped me, a little about my work, and what inspires me to do what I do. I’m also very inspired by everything that the Rotary Club is doing.
I grew up in Calcutta and went to St. Xavier’s School. I was actually preparing for the IITs, but there was a student four or five years ahead of me who got into Yale. That got into my head, and I decided that was where I wanted to go. I was lucky — I applied early, got in, and spent some years in the US. I had a regular career in investment banking and private equity, went to business school, and graduated.
One of the things that really shaped me in my early years was reading two books. One was Gandhiji’s autobiography, about his life of service and how he transformed himself as a human being. The other was Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, which taught me about discipline. More importantly, it highlighted how Franklin ran a printing press in Philadelphia but left that behind at the age of 43. His real life began then: he became the father of the US Constitution, invented the lightning rod, founded the University of Pennsylvania, and established the American Philosophical Society, among many other accomplishments. He was essentially free to pursue a variety of interests and wasn’t tied down by his business.
That left a deep impression on me. While I was in business school, I had a lot of spare time, to be honest. Reading cases was tough in the first month or two, but soon I was mostly partying. In my free time, I thought about what I really wanted to be when I grew up. The first promise I made to myself was that I wanted to become an entrepreneur by the age of 30.
My dad had been a company man all his life. I respect him for having had a great career and for raising me well, but I really wanted to be an entrepreneur. I had a boss who gave me the confidence to go out there and do it on my own. Private equity was something I had been exposed to in the US, but it was still new in India. The Asian financial crisis had just happened. I went to Harvard Business School, and many people were heading into private equity. Honestly, the hardest part was raising the money. The Asian financial crisis had occurred, and India and Pakistan had conducted nuclear tests. But I was lucky — I had the *thappa* from HBS and some connections.
I managed to secure capital and partnered with a friend from business school. We came back to Bombay. Our first office was at Mittal Chambers, very close to here, and then we moved to BKC, then Kamla Mills, and later I relocated to Delhi.
I think I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. I was in India post-reforms, after the slowdown in the 1990s. I made a lot of mistakes but also got lucky. From the beginning, I had this clear vision: I wanted to be an entrepreneur at 30, and by my mid-40s, I wanted to have a second career.
Frankly, life could have turned out differently. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to transition to a second career, but I was fortunate. Financially, I did well in my 30s, far beyond my needs and expectations. And since my needs didn’t grow much, I started thinking about a life of service, which I felt would be meaningful in my mid-40s and beyond.
Benjamin Franklin has always been my idol. I don’t think anyone can match what he accomplished, but I thought if I could achieve even a fraction of it, I would have led a meaningful life. So, while doing my day job, I started giving away money in small ways. It gave me an excuse to go into the community on weekends and see what was happening.
That’s when I began to understand what was wrong with school education in India: the bottom half of students were being left behind. Even after I finished my corporate career in 2012, the ASER data consistently showed that by the end of fifth grade, more than half of Indian children couldn’t read or write at a third-grade level. This was abysmal, and results had flatlined for a decade.
This left a deep impression on me. Education, especially during the early years, became a mission I wanted to work on. I later learned — something we should all know as parents — that Grade 3 is a seminal year. At this stage, children transition from *learning to read* to *reading to learn*. Missing this milestone has long-term consequences because the curriculum keeps moving forward, and children who fall behind stay behind.
This is what we call foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN). It’s crucial to invest in the early years to develop basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills — the three R’s. Without these skills, children’s learning trajectories plateau. I felt this was a meaningful mission to pursue because the data had flatlined for years. I began asking: what can one do about it?
The other challenge, frankly, stumbled into my lap because I had this dream when I was in college at Yale. I was lucky to have gone there, and it helped me become more of a Renaissance person — more well-rounded, with interests in a variety of different subjects, thanks to the broad education I received. Unfortunately, my friends back in India had a much narrower education. I always felt that our higher education system, which we inherited from the British, put students in a straitjacket — a very narrow, single-subject, rote-oriented approach.
In contrast, the ancient Indian education system, in places like Nalanda, Takshila, and Vikramshila, was much broader and holistic. It was more Socratic, interdisciplinary, and inclusive of the humanities, social sciences, and sciences of the time. That was the kind of education we needed in the 21st century.
I was lucky that Sanjeev Bikhchandani, an entrepreneur in Delhi who founded Naukri.com (Info Edge), reached out to me in 2007 for a coffee. We caught up, and he said, “Listen, I’m a Stephenian. I went to St. Stephen’s, and it’s going to the dogs. We need to do something about this.” His daughter was about to go to Columbia at the time, and he also felt that the US had a different model of education that we could learn from. However, he believed we needed to build a new university suited to the Indian context, with its own unique milieu.
These two ideas came to the forefront for me: the idea of building a university and working on foundational literacy and numeracy. At the same time, I was running a fund. 2007 was a bull market, and we raised a fairly large fund — the largest at the time. Mentally, I told myself this would be my last fund. I had colleagues who could take over from me, though I didn’t say this outright then, because, fortunately, I didn’t. The crash that followed meant I had to ensure we navigated through it before I was ready to leave.
By 2010, I felt things had stabilised. On holiday, I realised I was now 41, with my mid-40s fast approaching. My goal was to move on. In private equity, you live fund to fund, and we were about to raise the next fund when I turned 43. I thought it was better to inform my colleagues that I was planning to step away, giving myself a year or two to prepare. I also wanted to let our investors know, as I was a key man in the fund, and I didn’t want the firm to falter in my absence.
In hindsight, it was good that I made the decision one and a half to two years early. It gave everyone time to adjust to the news. Frankly, my leaving made no difference. We often overestimate our own importance, but at some level, we’re all replaceable. When I left, I did so completely. I had no equity, no position, no corporate board roles, nothing. I wanted to restart, prove to myself that I could begin again, and do something completely different.
Ashoka University was a single, ambitious project. We were naive. We bought land on the outskirts of Delhi — nine kilometres from the border, in Haryana. We thought it was close enough to the city and liked Haryana’s private university laws, but we had no idea of the scale required to build a good university. We stumbled into it, taking one step at a time.
Many of us came from corporate backgrounds, but others soon joined. Dr. Pramath Sinha, the founding dean of ISB, and Vinit Gupta, part of the IIT Delhi group, were among them. Initially, there were four of us. While none of us, except Pramath, had experience in higher education, we had an aspiration: to build something very different — a top-class institution in India. Our long-term dream was to create something akin to Harvard or Yale, but we knew it would take decades.
Sanjeev and I committed ₹250 crore each to the project. We hoped this would inspire others to contribute as well. We also made a conscious decision to establish a governance structure that wouldn’t depend on us. While we were members of the board, there were others involved, and Sanjeev formally stepped down from the board. We also decided that no family members would get involved.
Ultimately, the goal was for alumni to take over and contribute, ensuring the institution renews itself over time. That’s the governance model of most top universities worldwide: truly philanthropic, focused on research and teaching, and self-perpetuating. There is no owner. If you look at the top 200 universities in the world, this is the model they follow.
John Harvard’s children are not on the board of Harvard, and neither are Leland Stanford’s descendants involved in Stanford. None of these progeny are running around managing these institutions. So, we felt it was very important to step back and leave the institution behind in a way that allowed it to function independently.
We started working on Ashoka University the way any entrepreneur would: building it brick by brick, hiring the initial faculty, and getting the physical infrastructure in place. One thing I learned from Pramath, who had built ISB before, was that whatever we do, we must start with quality from day one.
When we were hiring our first few faculty members, we prioritised quality. One of them left Stanford to join Ashoka. Alex Watson, a British philosopher at Harvard, quit his position at Harvard to come to Ashoka. We decided to hire the best from around the world — Indians with PhDs from Columbia, UPenn, and other top institutions — and bring them back to India. We were fortunate that many wanted to return. That’s how we slowly built the institution.
We started very small, with only 120 students in the first year, because we wanted to prioritise quality over numbers. Even today, we take only 800 students a year. It’s a slow and steady process because it takes a long time to build a good institution.
Now, 10 years later, we have a solid foundation. We’ve come a long way, but we’re not yet world-class. We believe it will take at least another 15 to 20 years to achieve that.
Our current focus is on building a strong foundation with good teaching. Students come from 300–400 towns across India, and about 25 countries are represented at Ashoka. This diversity is great for teaching. However, in terms of becoming a world-class research institution, we still have a long way to go.
This is not a small project. Ashoka has become one of the largest collective philanthropy projects in India. When we started, people doubted that others would contribute. Today, we have over 200 founders who have each contributed more than ₹2 crore. Incredibly, 11 — soon to be 12 — founders have contributed over ₹100 crore each. Altogether, we’ve raised over ₹3,500 crore for the project, all philanthropic.
Our ambition is to raise ₹10,000 crore to build a top-class institution, but we’re only 35% of the way there.
Although Ashoka is a nonprofit, we didn’t want it to be limited by the small-scale ambitions that often trap nonprofits. Instead, we chose to stand on a different plank — interdisciplinarity. That’s why we focused on liberal arts and sciences: to offer an interdisciplinary, holistic education that is unique in the Indian context. Slowly but steadily, our aim is to create a top-class global institution, hopefully in our lifetime.
It’s not just about funding; it’s also about the effort and entrepreneurial spirit we bring to the table.
The other project I worked on, the Central Square Foundation, is very different and taught me different lessons. Here, I focused on the school system and foundational literacy and numeracy. The problem is massive, and I realised that building another school or working within one city wouldn’t be enough.
For five or six years, we experimented with different approaches: headmaster training in some states, teacher development, edtech, curriculum improvement, and assessment. But I became very frustrated. By the end of those six years, I had invested a significant amount of my own money, and because I wasn’t fundraising, I could afford to be brutally honest with myself. I realised we had achieved very little despite the resources spent.
We decided to reboot and stumbled upon a method called structured pedagogy, which had been successful in several countries transitioning from poor to fair education systems. Structured pedagogy operates on the principle that most teachers in the system are not Michelin-star chefs but McDonald’s employees — a somewhat pejorative analogy, so I hope you’ll excuse me.
The idea is that while the best teachers can create magic in the classroom independently, most teachers need a playbook. They need scripted lesson plans for every lesson, clear training, weekly formative assessments, remediation plans, and tools to help them function effectively. Structured pedagogy provides this.
We piloted this approach in four districts in India. Instead of adding extra teachers or resources, we focused on working within the system. We placed just four people in each district to energise the district administration, block officers, and cluster leaders to implement the method. The districts themselves paid for the necessary teacher tools and curriculum changes.
We also conducted a rigorous study, including a randomised control trial, to evaluate the results. We partnered with a few excellent organisations on this journey, and the outcomes were promising.
So then, once we were confident the evidence was good, we approached three Chief Ministers in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Haryana — all Hindi-speaking states, as we had the material in Hindi — and convinced them that FLN should be a state mission. We encouraged them to unlock budgets and rally political support behind it. Yogi Adityanath, for instance, when we presented the learning outcomes, took an oath on the document, declaring that teachers must swear by it and then go and deliver. These initiatives became state programmes, and I think that really helped because when Chief Ministers are behind something in mission mode, the system starts to wake up.
Our role was primarily as a technical partner, developing tools, but also as a project management partner. We worked inside the departments on five work streams: assessment, data systems, capacity building, goal-setting, and reviews. These were the kinds of systemic tasks we undertook, and we learnt a great deal from this process. Uttar Pradesh alone has a budget of ₹1 lakh crore for education, which is no small amount.
Our budget in Uttar Pradesh was ₹15 crore, primarily because we deployed a team at the state level and in some pilot districts, with four people per district and significant technical resources. In the context of ₹1 lakh crore, ₹15 crore felt like a drop in the ocean. Even if it didn’t work, losing ₹50–75 crore over a few years seemed like a worthwhile experiment. Similarly, we chose two other states to test the model. To our relief, the results were quite promising.
This gave us the confidence to engage with Dr Kasturirangan and others involved in drafting the New Education Policy (NEP) and advocate strongly for FLN.
One of the key lessons I’ve learnt in philanthropy at scale is to work systemically. The Indian system spends ₹8 lakh crore on education. Making that spend more effective and efficient is the ultimate goal. It’s not easy — it’s very hard to move a system — but we had evidence from low-resource pilots that were scalable. High-resource pilots are never scalable. With these results in hand, we began advocating for FLN.
The NEP presented a fantastic opportunity, and we were fortunate to contribute to its drafting. FLN was highlighted as the number one priority in education, to be implemented in mission mode within five years. The document was approved by the Cabinet, and soon after, the Prime Minister announced the national mission, Nipun Bharat.
This was a significant milestone. Nipun Bharat earmarked ₹13,000 crore over five years for curricular material, providing states with the funds to roll out structured pedagogy. With this, we expanded our work to 11 states, supporting governments in implementing the mission.
It has been a huge learning experience. The results have been mixed: five or six states are doing very well, while others are middling. Still, the experience has bolstered my confidence in the public system. I’ve seen that there is hope. The public system is open to external support, and like any institution, it has a bell curve.
There are early adopters, those in the middle who follow once they see results, and the laggards or naysayers who will never do anything. But the system is not entirely made up of naysayers. If you can shift one end of the bell curve, you can start to move the whole curve. For example, in the Prime Minister’s constituency of Varanasi, children in Grade 2 were reading at 15 words per minute two years ago. This year, that figure has risen to 50 words per minute.
Of course, this isn’t happening in every district. Varanasi benefits from having one of the best district education officers, so it’s no surprise that it’s a great place to work. But this success gave me confidence that systemic work presents huge opportunities.
We have to recognise that this is a complex issue. You won’t see transformative results in one or two years — progress will be incremental. It’s a journey that requires commitment over 10 years or more. For example, Nipun Bharat is currently a five-year mission, but we need to work with the government to extend it by another five years to fully achieve our goal of reducing learning poverty.
The World Bank’s learning poverty metric shows that over 55% of children fail to meet basic learning benchmarks. Our goal is to reduce this figure to 25% within a decade. That’s the larger ambition.
In time, my colleague Shamita took over as the CEO. Being an entrepreneur at heart, I decided to pursue a new purpose: creating more institutions. This led to the establishment of the Convergence Foundation, which focuses on setting up new organisations, mostly to work systemically.
I feel blessed to have been born in India, to witness the country’s development, and to have had the opportunity to receive a good education and do well financially. India presents unique challenges — large-scale, complex problems that require innovative solutions. But we also have some fantastic people to partner with, from extremely talented individuals in the development sector to smart, dedicated professionals within government.
I remain optimistic. While we’ve made significant progress in areas like roads, electricity, and sanitation, education and health are inherently more complex because they involve human behaviour. Building a school is straightforward; ensuring that the classroom transaction changes is not. A teacher must act differently for meaningful learning to occur. You can construct state-of-the-art facilities, but without a change in pedagogy, nothing will improve.
These are hard problems, but the needle is starting to move.
I also work on initiatives related to economic growth, and I truly believe that this is India’s moment. Thank you all for the work you do, and thank you for honouring me with this award. I deeply appreciate it.
ROTARIANS ASK
Ashoka is probably now ranked as India’s number one university, and being the ethos of a university, it is able to speak its mind, often saying things that are not very comfortable for the ruling government of the day. Going forward, how do you sort of navigate that? I know you had your share of problems.
Yeah, look, it’s a difficult path to navigate. I think, generally, my view is that in India, we do have academic freedom. We’re not China. Academics write papers and do their work. We don’t tell them what curriculum to set; they define what books students read — all of that. Students have very lively discussions in the classroom. I think the issue arises with certain sensitive topics. I would just say there’s academic freedom with maybe some red lines. If you write about Kashmir, for example, it’s a sensitive topic. If you write about certain things like elections, it’s a sensitive topic. One just has to be aware of those red lines. So, I think that’s one point.
We don’t police academics or tell them what to do. We just advise them to be mindful of these red lines. It’s for their own sake that they need to be cautious.
Secondly, I would say that as an institution, we have to remain neutral. For instance, we had a Vice-Chancellor, Pratap, who is a phenomenal intellectual. Unfortunately, his anti-government writings came to be associated with Ashoka, which was not reflective of the university’s stance. We are a platform. At the end of the day, different ideas should be communicated to students.
Because of that experience, we decided that going forward, anyone in leadership must take a very neutral stance. Leadership should actually be apolitical — not talk about politics, but focus on research and teaching. Frankly, I think that’s a good global standard. That has been our learning and our way forward. I think you can still build a great academic institution if you adhere to that.
Thanks.
I completely agree with you that we have to work with the government. At Impact India Foundation, where I am the Managing Trustee, we work with Anganwadi workers and children. What we do is focus on skill development for Anganwadi workers. We train them, and we also refurbish the Anganwadis. What we’ve found very interesting — and as the literature says — is that the brain grows most rapidly in children between the ages of two to six. That’s the time we have to capture. Why are we not concentrating on this age group? This is where the foundation is built.
What we’ve observed over the last 30 years of working in this field is that after the second or third standard, children drop out because their foundational learning is weak. So, as a government or as an organisation, how can we go forward in addressing this gap for the age group of two to six?
Certainly, this is a very important area. In fact, we work a little in this area too. However, one thing we’ve done wrong — or should be doing differently — is that we are under-resourced. If you look at it, we spend only 3% of our education budget on ECE (Early Childhood Education) for children under six. The gold standard is 10%. In most of the emerging world, it’s somewhere between 5% and 8%. So, we are under-spending.
Secondly, there’s very strong evidence that placing an extra teacher in an Anganwadi makes a huge difference. Currently, the Anganwadi worker has to handle too many tasks, such as home visits, immunisation, nutrition, and more. As a result, there’s not enough time left for education.
So, while there are ways to strengthen the system, it requires more resources and greater commitment from the government. Just as we have Nipun Bharat for Grades 1, 2, and 3, we need to prioritise early childhood education and put it into mission mode going forward.
But what Impact India has done is we’ve identified one woman in each area and trained her — similar to an Anganwadi worker. In the evenings, she goes home and teaches language, maths, communication, and even singing and dancing. This has added a community play element to our work. That evening programme, which we call the Gharcha Programme, has enhanced our work. As you rightly said, in Anganwadis, people are often more focused on other tasks than teaching.