Last week I met Pranil in his modest office at Goregaon, Mumbai. He runs a Nonprofit LeapForWord through which he is helping kids from vernacular schools learn English. They have developed a solution called English Literacy Program which enables teachers to teach English without the need to have expertise in the language. For his efforts, he won Ashoka Fellowship in November 2014. In our conversation I asked him about how he approached the problem of English literacy, his product, life after Ashoka fellowship and his vision for his organization.
Here are some tidbits from the chat:
Even today we don’t consider ourselves academicians, we are more practitioners
This sector has a lot of passion but it does not have enough of measurement
Every time the market proves you wrong, you come back and alter your assumptions
One constant theme over the years has been repetitive failure
Google works on the concept called Statistical probability, which means more the searches around the same string Google will get better. We look at it from language perspective
English learning is a great aspiration not just because it adds to self-esteem but also because it opens doors
Ashoka Fellowship is a very intense thorough selection process
Where we are today makes us believe that we have a definite chance of solving the problem
It will be really a shame if LeapForWord stays around for another 10 years which means the problem is still around
See the entire conversation here: