- In India, poverty is so pervasive
that you can either decide
to forget about it or you can decide to fight it.
We can't ignore it.
India has the world's largest child population.
More than 150 million children
in the age group of zero to six years of age live in India.
50% of them go to the free government system.
However, if you look at grade five
and learning outcomes, we find that nearly half
of the kids in India are unable
to read a single paragraph
or to do basic subtraction or division,
we train them as unable to do anything
for their informal education
or even formal employment.
My goal as a social entrepreneur
is to come up with solutions and innovations
that really change the fabric of the world
in a way that benefits low-income populations
and populations that nobody is building anything for.
Essentially, we're trying to change the social fabric
of the country and the norms of the country,
those situations where low-income parents who are majority
of the population are actually going
to spend time every day 20 minutes on learning.
This is a huge change.
You're trying to basically shift time use patterns
of a huge population
onto something that they've not been doing earlier.
And so I think that challenge is what consumes us every day.
So I was born to a family of government officials.
We lived in smaller parts of India as well,
and we could see the poverty
and the lack of opportunities that others faced.
But I was lucky that I was a middle class family
and got the best out of education.
I think from early age,
we were cognizant of the privilege
that we've had in terms of great education,
the opportunities that that afforded us,
and on the flip side, the lack of opportunity
that faces more than five crore,
or 50 million children today
in the zero to six age group in the country.
The more I thought about it
and the more over the last 10 years
that I've worked in the social impact space,
I felt that the first six years
are where most of your development happens
with your brain and your body.
We're an EdTech nonprofit working
to help one million children in India so far
with early childhood education.
Our short-term goal at Rocket Learning
is to really comprehensively work together
to help children get up to speed.
Rocket Learning's approach
is to create these dynamic digital communities
of parents and preschool teachers
to empower them and inspire them to be active participants
and enablers in their child's journey.
So Rocket Learning has created 70,000 WhatsApp groups,
which act as dynamic communities
on which we are able to share some content
that is easy for children to do in their own homes
or in their learning centers.
You already are on WhatsApp,
you're already using it
to send messages to your family, et cetera, et cetera.
And so through that, 70,000 groups
and one million parents get our content.
We're able then to send back nudges and content.
It's very personalized for a particular user
or a particular group, particular teacher.
We have more than 2,000 audiovisual pieces,
worksheets, et cetera, et cetera
that are then shared with the last mile,
with parents and teachers
who can then use them in their daily life.
- [Narrator] The railways are shut,
the airlines will soon be shut.
Interstate bus travel is all shut.
There's a lot of unknowns
about how this is gonna play out in India
and the honest truth is nobody really knows at this point.
For close to two years in India
and in fact in the world,
children did not come to schools.
So most schooling actually shifted to homeschooling
for those two years.
And so maybe the higher income child
didn't lose out on so much.
They also had access to online classes and so on.
But low income children living in rural parts
of the world were not able to access
any sort of online education.
For the most part, that's where our programs,
following aging parents through technology
actually came into being.
It's not rocket science honestly
to teach kids the basic fundamentals.
You just need to be able to give some information
to the right person.
One is parents of children, low income parents.
Secondly, we saw
that there are these 1.3 million Anganwadi workers
across the country,
daycare workers paid by government, all female.
They feel that they can be educators
and that they should be recognized as such
and they also feel that they need support
to do a better job in their classrooms.
Over the last few years,
we've been lucky to see phenomenal impact
on the children, parents and preschool teachers
who've been a part of the program.
We've seen that for parents
that is very significant behavior change.
Parents who're a part of our program
are actually engaging twice the number of time,
the number of days
as counterparts who are not part of the program.
They spend a lot more time with their children,
they're a lot more confident in their abilities,
and for children themselves,
we see that they are actually school ready
and life ready by the age of six
if they've gone through the program.
Their scores on tests improved by 30% or more
but more importantly, they actually shifted to the top 1/3
of what they would have been
if they were not part of this program.
Even beyond academic skills,
I think the most visible signs of impact
are when I go to the field
and talk to parents and Anganwadi workers.
And they tell me that children
are not afraid of going to school anymore,
they're not running away.
They want to go to the center.
They're looking forward to these playful learning activities
as opposed to running away from them.
They're confident in what they can do,
they don't mind getting up in front of a group,
and showcasing what they are able to do
and they have more self-control,
and ability to interact with others as well.
I think in that way,
if you go and see some of these children,
really see them in a very different trajectory
from what they were on otherwise.
There have been so many times
when I thought that we've bitten off more
than we can chew.
That we're attempting the impossible.
And in fact, a lot of the ecosystem
has told us this as well,
that why you're working with parents?
How are they going to make a change?
How are you using technology in a country
that often doesn't have any?
But then luckily, it's always been counterbalanced
by the community of users
that we've had who've told us in no uncertain terms
that what you're doing is helpful to us
and we want you to continue working with us.
The most significant part
about our success as the Rocket Learning organization
has been the fact that we've been able
to get a lot of talented vision-oriented people
right from the beginning
who work together without any ego,
all with the single-minded focus to solve the problem.
I've been incredibly fortunate in my personal journey
to have family members, parents,
my spouse, siblings who have been willing
to support whatever I do
and in fact, who don't think it's a step down
to go into social entrepreneurship
from a corporate career.
The thing that is the best thing
that I could be doing and they're proud of me
for doing that.
And it takes away all pressure on you
to follow your dreams.
A lot of my personal journey
has been driven by folks who have supported me
and they've known
that I'm not gonna be financially as successful
as many of my peers.
They've thought whatever I'm doing
is the best thing that I could be doing,
and that I'll change the world
and that's really been a huge support for me.