Advisory Council

Chief Executive Officer, Kaivalya Education Foundation & Piramal Foundation

Aditya Natraj

Aditya Natraj is the CEO of Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF), and the Piramal Foundation. Previously, Aditya was the Director of Pratham in Gujarat for 5 years, Vice-President of Business Development at ProXchange for 2 years and a Consultant at KPMG for 5 years. He is a qualified Chartered Accountant, a Masters in Economics and has an MBA from INSEAD. Aditya has been awarded various fellowship and awards, namely the Ashoka Fellowship, Echoing Green Fellowship, Aspen India Fellowship and the Times Now Amazing Indian award in the Education category.

Philanthropist & MD, Bain Capital

Amit Chandra

Amit Chandra joined Bain Capital as a Managing Director in early 2008, and is a part of the firm’s leadership team in Asia. He received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from VJTI, Bombay University, post which he worked at India’s leading engineering & construction firm, Larsen & Toubro. He then received his MBA from Boston College and was awarded the school’s Distinguished Alumni in 2007. Prior to joining Bain Capital, Amit spent most of his professional career at DSP Merrill Lynch, a leading investment bank in India. He retired from DSP Merrill Lynch in 2007 as its Board Member & Managing Director, to move to Private Equity. Mr. Chandra was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007 and was named in Asia’s Heroes of Philanthropy list by Forbes in 2016, along with his wife Archana. He is currently or in the past has served as a Member of the Board of Directors of a number of leading companies, like Tata Sons, Genpact, L&T Finance, Emcure Pharmaceuticals, Piramal Enterprises, and Tata Investment Corporation. He is also active in India’s not for profit space, and is or has been associated as a Trustee of the Tata Trusts, as a Founder/Board Member of Ashoka University, a Board Member of Give India and The Akanksha Foundation. He also a Member of the Advisory Boards of Bridgespan in India, the Centre for Social Impact & Philanthropy, and Swades Foundation.

Founder CEO, The Education Alliance

Amitav Virmani

Amitav Virmani, Founder CEO, The Education Alliance. The Education Alliance aims to help governments in India provide a quality education to every child, by facilitating effective partnerships between state and non-state actors. The vision of TEA is to empower government schools to create the next generation of leaders. They work to catalyze quality transformation in India’s education system by nurturing the Government-Partnership School model. Prior to this Amitav was Country Director, ARK India, a UK based NGO. As their CD, Amitav was responsible for launching several programmes around school leadership, english literacy, school vouchers and school quality assessments. Amitav worked as a General Manager in the office of the CEO & MD at Ranbaxy Laboratories prior to his switch to the development sector. Amitav began his post MBA career in the USA working for Bristol Myers Squibb & Co. based in Princeton. Amitav is an alumnus of St. Stephens College, Delhi University. He got his MBA from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and worked in the US for 4 years before returning home. Amitav is an Aspen India Leadership Initiative 3 Fellow and an Ashoka Fellow 2016.

Director, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation India LLP

Debasish Mitter

Debasish Mitter serves as Director, India, at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and leads the foundation’s strategy and operations in India to improve quality of education, employability skills, family economic stability, and health. In his role, Debasish helps to manage and develop the India-based portfolio to drive large-scale systemic transformations in public education and to incubate start-ups to bring innovative products and services to the market. Prior to joining the foundation, he spent 13 years with American Express in various leadership positions in their Delhi, Miami and New York offices. During his career with American Express, he led a variety of operational, transaction-related, finance and strategic responsibilities. Prior to that, Debasish spent a number of years with Dowell Schlumberger, an oilfield services leader, in senior finance roles in the Middle East and the Far East. Debasish is a chartered accountant.

Founder, ISDM

Gaurav Shah

Gaurav has over 13 years of experience working both in private sector as well as in the development space (microfinance, health, impact investment, education) largely as a management consultant (P&G, American Express, Azim Premji Foundation, Lok Capital etc.). His areas of experience include program management and implementation, strategic and business planning, organization restructuring and design and sales & distribution management.

Chairman, Centre for Civil Society and CORO

Luis Miranda

Luis is Chairman of CORO and Centre for Civil Society. He is also actively involved with other non-profits including SNEHA, CARE India, Educate Girls, and Take Charge. He spends his time these days connecting the dots for amazing social entrepreneurs, using his network to help the organisations he is connected with. Luis is also Senior Advisor to Morgan Stanley Infrastructure and Advisor to the Nadathur Group. Prior to this, he was involved with setting up two highly successful companies – HDFC Bank and IDFC Private Equity. He is on Chicago Booth’s Global Advisory Board and Social Enterprise Initiative’s Advisory Board and writes a blog for Forbes India. Luis received an MBA from the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India.

Founder, Crossover Catalyst

Moomal Mehta

Moomal has 16 years of experience with Citibank in leadership roles across Delhi, Chicago and Bombay. After Citi, she was the Deputy Director at Asia Society India Centre for 5 years, responsible for programming, fundraising and key stakeholder relationships. Moomal has a Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta.

Crossover Catalyst is a search firm for the social sector. It is rooted in the belief that non-profits and social enterprises play a critical role in solving some of India’s most pressing problems, and attracting high quality, leadership-level talent from the outside the sector could be an important enabler in creating scale and enhancing impact for many of these organizations. They currently serve over 75 impact sector organizations for their senior people needs and have transitioned 23 individuals into leadership roles in the sector. Crossover Catalyst is founded by Moomal Mehta.

Founder & Director, Indian School of Development Management (ISDM)

Ravi Sreedharan

Ravi has worked for 24 years in the Corporate Sector most of which was at HSBC. At HSBC, Ravi has worked as the Regional Marketing Head for the Middle East and Africa, Head of Consumer Products for Asia Pacific, Consumer Banking Head of Indonesia, CEO and President Director of Bank Ekonomi (a local bank in Indonesia that was acquired by HSBC). He quit his corporate career and switched to the social sector 5 years ago with Azim Premji Foundation where he was the Head of Education Leadership & Management.

Founder & Executive Director, Educate Girls

Safeena Husain

Safeena Husain is the Founder and Executive Director of Educate Girls – a non-profit organisation that aims at tackling issues at the root cause of gender inequality in India’s education system. After graduating from the London School of Economics, Safeena spent over a decade working with grassroots projects in Latin America, Africa & Asia. Educate Girls presently works in 21,000 government-run primary schools spread across 15 districts of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. There are over 4.9 million total beneficiaries of its programmatic interventions. Under Safeena’s leadership, Educate Girls has initiated the world’s first Development Impact Bond (DIB) in education. She has been conferred with 2017 NITI Aayog’s Women Transforming India Award and has in the past received the British Asian Trust’s Special Recognition Award from HRH Prince Charles for outstanding contribution in education.

Global CEO, English Helper

Sanjay Gupta

Sanjay Gupta commenced his professional journey in Finance in the early 1980s working across a range of reputed companies in India including the Tata Group, Eicher – Mitsubishi, Pepsi and Motorola. Sanjay joined American Express in 1996 and held a number of business leadership roles based in New Delhi, New York and Singapore. In 2010, decided to pursue a new career to build a social enterprise for giving back in a sustainable way. Sanjay assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer at English Helper Inc. The company is committed to providing innovative and affordable technology enabled English learning to people across all age groups and income segments. Most recently, the company has initiated ‘RightToRead’ with a view to enable English literacy in public schools across the world and has launched ‘EnglishBolo’ in India designed to help youth from low income backgrounds to improve English speaking skill. In addition, Sanjay is engaged with the cause of children and youth as an active Board Member at Udayan Care, and School of Inspired Leadership. He is guest faculty at Duke University’s Executive Education Program and delivers programs on doing business across cultures, customer and brand, leadership during change. Sanjay also coaches senior executives/ business leaders with special focus on developing personal excellence. Sanjay is on the Boards of BOI AXA Asset Management Company and Skills Training Assessment Management Partners. He is Advisor, Acumen India.

CEO, Janaagraha

Srikanth Viswanathan

Looking back: The most important positive development over the past decade has in my view been the gradual but definitive opening up of governments to partnering, resulting in a coming together of sorts, of government, civil society, philanthropy and business to a much greater degree than before. Twenty first century challenges require a partnering approach to problem solving, particularly in India where state capacities will only be built over the long-term.

Looking ahead: The development sector is presently smitten by linear problem solving, of carefully picking the problem that may be relatively easier to solve in the near term rather than solving for the system which in turn can solve the problem. This system is democracy, not just at the central and state levels, but more importantly at the local neighbourhood level. I would therefore like to see organisations in the development sector close ranks and strengthen democracy and citizenship at the grassroots.

Chief People Officer - Azim Premji Foundation

Sudheesh Venkatesh

Sudheesh Venkatesh is the Chief People Officer at the Azim Premji Foundation and a member of the Board of Management of Azim Premji University. After a degree in Engineering and a post-graduate degree in Management from Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata, Sudheesh worked for close to a decade each with Asian Paints and Tesco, two large, global organisations. He has been with the Azim Premji Foundation since 2010 and his role is to attract, develop and retain good people who can help the Foundation realise its vision. He was President of the National HRD Network, Bangalore (2013-15), served on the National Board of the HRD Network (2013-17) and has co-edited the most recent issue of the HRD Journal on ‘Education, Employability and Employment landscape in India’. He is often invited to speak and write on matters relating to people & organisations.

Partner, Career Coach, Quadrangle

Surabhi Bikhchandani

An alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad and St. Stephen’s College, Surabhi has over 25 years of experience largely in Recruitment Consulting and recently in Career Coaching. Leading the Executive Search practice at Quadrangle, she has successfully closed many leadership positions for her clients that include start-ups and social purpose organisations. Her focus is on detailed assessments of candidates to get the right organisation culture fit. Surabhi has been associated with ILSS since its inception. She is an advisor to Project Udhyam that is helping build rural entrepreneurship in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. She is a certified Career Coach (Nov 2018- Erickson International ACSTH Certified) with a mission to make her clients experience a positive transformation.

Pro-Vice Chancellor – Development, Placements, and Alumni Relations Ashoka University

Venkatesam Eshwara