Daljit Mirchandani was born in 1947 in Sindh – and now stays in Sindh Society. He grew up as a kid facing a lot of health issues. The turning point in his life was his joining BIT Mesra – and at the age of 17, being dunked into a gym by his Sardar friend. That bit of exercise did him good – fitness and success in his life, he believed, went hand in hand. The fitness / success story continues till date. On retiring as Chairman of Ingersoll Rand, at the age of 60, he put a fitness goal of running a half marathon. He has just turned 70 this year, and he celebrated that with a full marathon. I am looking forward to his double marathon, at the age of 80!
Coming back to BITS Mesra, where our friend did his Elecrical engineering. He had two offers from campus in 1971: Siemens, which paid Rs. 400 a month, and Kirloskar which paid double. The electrical engineer was torn between choosing his profession or the moolah. The moolah won – and he joined Kirloskar foundry. This change of profession right at the beginning of his career taught him an important lesson; every few years jog away from your zone of comfort and do something new. His boss at Kirloskar, Shantanu bhau, ensured that Daljit was always on the track. From running the Kirloskar ad agency setting up a Greenfield foundry, negotiating with developmental bankers – he has been there and done that.
By the ripe age of 50, he was Executive Director at Kirloskar Oil Engines Ltd. Over a drink with his mentor, who was on the board of HLL, it was suggested to him that he needs to again kick his comfort zone out of the picture. And that is how Ingersoll Rand happened – where he was kicked into the Chairmanship. Ingersoll was an entirely different cup of tea compared to the Kirloskar chai. A MNC, which like most other MNCs of the nineties, was very US focused. Decisions that would get taken overnight at Kirloskar, would take months.
Moving to Ingersoll taught Daljit the power of influence vis-à-vis control. It took him 6 months just to learn the art of management in an MNC context. But looking back at his 10 year innings at Ingersoll, he feels satisfied that he was able to get US headquarters to acknowledge India’s engineering talent pool – and get them to set up a global engineering center here.
By now you would have realized that Daljit was just not going to be riding into the sunset – or should we say jogging into it – post retirement. He decided that after having spent 40 years profiting from society, he would spend the next forty giving back to it. If India had to encash its demographic dividend, it needed reform in education. And what better way to start it than with Primary education.
His mission is to work with primary level government schools – specifically with teachers. In his accomplished management style – his 2012 established NGO, Gyan Prakash – is already 50 strong and 6 years later is working with 200 schools across Maharashtra. The agenda is a simple one – how do you get students involved in the classroom. In keeping with Daljit’s hands off style, he spared us of most of the details, delegating all education related questions to his colleague, Pallavi. (Unfortunately, I had to leave his talk early, so could not interact with her.)
With NGOs the biggest challenges are in managing the government – and fund-raising. Daljit’s links with the corporate world have helped the latter. And his stint at Ingersoll Rand the former. Daljit believes that gradual change is the best one – because it is sustainable. Another thing he believes strongly in – is the power of good homework. He spent the first two years just planning for what would be required to change the system. He researched processes. Not a reinventor of wheels, he identified educational partners who could equip him with with the pedagogical and assessment tools that would be required for change management.
Coming to fund raising, an experience with the Hospet project was very instructive. The bankers, IDBI, pushed for reducing the project payback period from 6.5 years to 5.5 years. Having made those small changes in an Excel sheet, the 150 cr funds were released. But 3 years later reality struck; the project was still not finished and the funds were. There came a time when the group was seriously considering divesting the project. Diverting the entire top management time to managing bankers helped save the project. It also taught Daljit an important lesson – always have reserve power in finance. He applies this principle to Gyan Prakash. Funding follows belief. He is covered at any time by his CSR donors for the next two years of fund requirement. His NGO has never missed a single salary payment!
Gyan Prakash took up a pilot project working with one cluster – 14 schools – in Khed Shivapur, near Pune. After that the next step was working on the entire Velhe block. The current one involves three districts – Parbhani, Nandurbar and Jalna. His take-away is that there is a lot of machinery in the government which is rusted. All that is required is a push here and there – and some intellectual oil – to get the wheels moving again. Being a catalyst is more important than being the driver.
Gyan Prakash spends a lot of time and energy observing and understanding teachers. His corporate thumb rule works with rural schools too. 1 in 10 teachers are good – and can help drive change. His first task is to identify these teachers – and then concentrate his resources on these teachers. Gyan Prakash’s goal is ambitious – touching more than 20 crore students that India has through its programs. The ambition cannot be achieved without the use of technology. Anup’s wife, Rupashree, asked him about the aptness of technology for primary kids. Indeed, research suggests that tech is best used by students after grade 6. Daljit clarified that his idea is to use technology is primarily to reach out to teachers. He is using Ek Step, a teacher platform developed by Nandan Nilekani, to this effect.
As I was leaving I managed to put in a question. ‘The government is getting a lot of value from Gyan Prakash – that too Free of Cost – do they see value in it?’ He talked of the 10-90 rule – and says that it is the 10 that need to see the value, the rest don’t matter. What did not get covered in his answer though was how does he plan to make Gyan Prakash a self sustaining social enterprise. He had an interesting kaizen on the question asking front. Post-it notes had been stuck on all chairs and 3 categories of questions specified. Audience had to write down the question and pass it on to the volunteers. The experiment did not pan out well – as the TiE audience continued the verbal assault that they like to mount on the speakers. One interesting question was how does one hone the skill of influencing. Daljit’s simple metallurgical answer – just jump into the furnace!
In Jan 21 bumped into Daljit at Dravid High School, Wai. Chat notes continue here.
The Gyan Prakash foundation is running a community school in a slum near Sindh society. We must visit sometime. They had peaked at 75 students. Down to 25 now. What could be a solution? Gyan jyoti is working on making IB inspired student wise dossiers available to ZP school teachers using a tech platform. Do they do that with their own school? Like in the corporate world, teachers require data to plan and make decisions. This will help in competency mapping. The Gyan jyoti team has identified 128 competencies in math, which need to be acquired over grades 1 to 5. And also a chronology. Which competencies are foundational for acquiring subsequent ones. Daljeet used an analogy of navigation – the skill assessment tests are a lat long location. It tells the teachers where her students are, how are they progressing on their journeys to a different lat-long. The teacher charts the journey along with students. The tool only helps her with this charting, by offering options on content et al.
Teacher motivation is going to be driven by the 10 percent early adopters. We need to start any change process by first identifying these change agents. And we need to work on developing skills specifically for this set of teachers. By inviting guest speakers. By allowing ZP shikshan samitis to transform from administrative coordination bodies to academic best practices sharing institutions. Inviting teachers of like minded schools to attend academic exchange workshops would be a great idea. Or even parents from the neighborhood communities.
Nagesh stepped in at this time with a caveat, neither does education does not happen at assembly line speeds nor is there uniformity in the student learning process. Something that corporates find difficult to digest. Handling diversity is a challenge not just for teachers, but for our nation. And handling diversity becomes more difficult as you centralize more and make the system stronger. The evaluation metrics path needs to be broader. Why measure, what is essentially a subjective outcome, with great precision? Instead our factory model of education has dumbed down standards to ensure that consistency goals can be achieved.
Nagesh’s advice to Daljit was there should be fun, even in skill assessments. I remember doing assessment centers for corporates where we would make them play games and observe them doing that. During assessment teachers should observe the kids, and decide how they can use their student talents to the best. My advice to teachers to improve their own fun factor is to ask students questions whose answers teachers themselves do not know. Nagesh talked about a book written by one of his New English school teachers on teaching English. He contrasted the informal style with the very formal and boring, Wren and Martin. Nagesh’s parting advice for increasing the fun factor: in classrooms: work on increasing the depth of knowledge instead of the spread.
Gyan Prakash Chat, 1-Jan-22
Met with Daljit and Manoj on the first day of the new year. We started with a general discussion on the scenario of education in the last two years. The new education policy talks about the Foundation years – From nursery to class 3. And how numeracy and literacy are important. The teacher mindset is biased towards performance in exams and not in student understanding. Math phobia for students starts somewhere from grade 5 when separate teachers for mathematics start appearing. This later manifests itself in formula mugging up.
The pillars of Gyan Prakash’s educational philosophy remains Competence benchmarking and Personalized Interactions based on mapping. He has used this to good effect in the corporate world and believes that this will also work in the educational world too. For benchmarking a 10th standard student, 200 competencies in math have been identified by the Gyan Prakash team. The depth of knowledge can be judged by the quality of questions that are being used for the benchmarking. At the very simplest level are mechanical simple plugging in a formula kind of questions and at the upper end are application related questions. The challenge for the teacher is to be able to push up the levels of difficulty for students.
According to Daljit the silver lining in this Covid era cloud on education is the village school. He had just come back from a trip to Nandurbar and Satara. He reported that things are going really well in gram panchayat schools. Decisions about opening and closing are taken at Panchayat level, so they are kept open mostly. The initiative that Gyan Prakash foundation has been working on is the Parent Academic Review of student’s performance, in urban jargon PTA. This is now getting traction from teachers. Even in places where Gyan Prakash has stopped working, schools are continuing with this.
Prasad Ram is the brain behind Learning Navigator. He is based out of California. Used to be the Google CTO earlier. Daljit is taking implementation advice from Shridhar Shukla, who was earlier the Persistent CEO and later on became the founder of GS Labs. He has exited GS labs a few years ago and the rumour is that his stake sale fetched him a few hundred crore rupees. Shridhar is a product fan and his advice to Manoj was to focus on updated content.
Daljit believes that by the time a student comes to 8th standard she should be in self navigation mode, with a little bit of curated help. The baseline assessment for an 8th standard student is based on the 7th standard syllabus. This assessment happens typically around the first week of school. From then on the navigation process will be in autopilot mode. The current solution offered by Navigator is a point to point solution. Cisco has given Prasad Ram a 1 crore grant to convert this point to point solution to a fill in the gaps line solution. In other words, working on the process.
With the rural initiative Gyan Prakash has been able to cover 30% of the country’s student population. But there has been a significant shift towards what Daljit calls affordable schools. In a sense schools like Peepal Tree. Also parents continue to rely on tuitions, both the home grown variety as well as the new ed techs that have popped up in recent times. Daljit wants to explore what makes tuition classes tick and how Gyan Prakash can incorporate Learning Navigator inside the school and tuition.
One implementation idea is that the student stays on after school and does a remedial class. The first experiment is starting in the field of math. Daljeet wants to pilot Navigated learning at a tuition centre with a Bulls Eye center. We need to help him validate and check out if this navigated learning really helps students. Manoj is a bit pessimistic but I think it’s worth a try. The current thinking is to have math labs in schools to be handled by teachers who show initiative and ownership. We will not go to teachers who resist. My suggestion was to work with senior students instead of teachers. Students are more flexible and are more optimistic.