We speak to Madhav Chavan, CEO of Indian NGO Pratham, about moving policy from school attendance to quality of education, and the impact of a communist upbringing

Firstly, tell us what Pratham does?

Pratham was set up in 1994 and has been working as a tripartite partnership between the government, the corporate sector and citizens to try to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the government school system in India. We do this firstly with our national survey - ASER - which measures the learning levels of a sample of 600,000 children between the ages of 6-14. The second part is our flagship Read India programme which aims to improve reading and basic arithmetic skills. Our hope is that by measuring and addressing the impact of the education system we will lay the foundation for further transformation.

Your vision is "every child in school and learning well". What do you mean by this?

When we began the international community measured education by the number of years you were in school. We challenged these assumptions with research which illustrated that barely 50% of India's school children can read. We decided that going to school was not enough and so differentiate ourselves from other NGOs by saying going to school and 'learning well'.

How much progress has been made?

We have had to battle against a strong anti-measurement bias in India, but our approach did begin to have resonance shortly after we began. The Indian social and political landscape was changing at that time and the economy was being liberalised. The consciousness of education was simultaneously evolving: the old social justice argument of education as a human right was coming together with the argument that India could not have economic growth without having quality universal education.

There has since been a lot of progress worldwide: in the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals we are likely to see a global shift towards learning outcomes. In India too there is increasing recognition that measurement in education is important. One of the greatest marks of progress is that in our next five year planning process, the government has come out and said it will honour measurable learning outcomes – this is a huge policy shift. India does still have some way to go in improving its understanding of data and measurement techniques, but this itself is a learning process.

Your organisation works in 21 of the 28 Indian states, reaching over 33 million children. How are you able to work at such a scale?

Firstly, I think we have a different mentality to other Indian NGOs: many of them are about doing small-scale, high-quality work which they expect to then be replicated by government and scaled up. We recognised this rarely happens and we weren't going to wait for it to improve. We aimed to work at scale from the outset as we wanted to try and reach all children.

Central to our approach has been our community volunteers. We now have people in the programme leadership who have come from the bottom of society. I think this inclusivity has been crucial to enable us to reach as many children as possible.

You've had a diverse career, including being a chemistry professor and a singer. Where would you say your interest in development has come from and how has it led to being co-founder of Pratham?

I was born into a very politically aware family: my grandfather was a judge and my father was an active communist, so I grew up surrounded by talk of revolution and justice. To some extent becoming a chemistry professor was an accident but I never lost touch with the socio-political realities of the world. After some years, I began questioning what my father had fought for and so I left teaching and began working on adult literacy campaigns in Mumbai's slums. This movement grew and from there I became involved with Pratham.

What would you still like to see Pratham achieve?

We are still in the habit of sending kids to school and expecting they will come out and go to college and get jobs, but the realities of the job market are changing and we need to respond to that. In some ways the school system is seen as a kind of daycare. Education has to be redefined and I would like Pratham to find a solution that is different.

What makes a good development leader?

Empathy is fundamental, as is creativity, clarity of thought and an awareness of the world – even if you are working in a small remote village. It is also important to have open ears, eyes and an open mind. However a sense of humour is the most important thing, this helps you to allow yourself to make errors, continually question yourself and to take risks.

What is the future of development?

I think development has to deal with the inequalities in the world. In India specifically, we need to think about what our growth means and how it is concentrated. The term 'development' refers to something very specific today but ensuring minimum basic necessities for all has been a human dream for centuries. I think there is now a growing consciousness that didn't exist 20 years ago; for example we can now see young people worldwide challenging inequality through the Occupy movement. A rejection of the existence of abject poverty – I think this is going to dominate human consciousness from now on.

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