Mr. Vallabh Bhanshali is a leading investment banker, investor, venture capitalist and capital-markets expert of the country. He is the co-founder and Chairman of ENAM group and DeshApnayenSahayog Foundation. He is a Trustee of the Bombay Stock Exchange and serves on various committees of the stock exchange, SEBI and other bodies. He is the Director of Maya Entertainment Ltd. and served as Director of AXIS Bank Ltd. A person with wide interests, he has lectured throughout his career, conducted professional seminars and published several articles. Apart from the field of finance and economic development, he is keenly interested in behavioral sciences and religion. He has received many awards and honors, including the ‘Veteran Economist of the Capital Markets’ citation from the Indian Council of Business.

Mr Sameer Muttha is the Director of the Muttha Group, which strives to create iconic residential and commercial spaces driven by the spirit of philanthropy. He started his career in the software business, executing over 1200 projects for clients in over 60 countries in a period of less than three years. He received the Best IT Parks Award from the Maharashtra Government in 2009. He is a member of CREDAI, and took a delegation of around 80 real estate developers from India to South Korea, leading to business generation worth over 10 million USD.

Prof R Govinda is the ex-Vice Chancellor of the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), New Delhi. Previously, he worked in reputed educational institutes such as the Institute of Education, University of London; MS University of Baroda and the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP), UNESCO.

He is a member of several national and international bodies. He has been on the editorial board of the Global Education Monitoring Report; Consultant Fellow to International Bureau of Education; Member of the Governing Board of UNESCO Institute of Statistics, Montreal; Member of the Central Advisory Board of Education; and Member of the National Advisory Committee on Right to Education of Government of India.

His research interests include primary education and literacy, decentralized management, programme evaluation, and reforms in higher education. He has published widely on these issues in several books and journals. Oxford University Press has recently published an edited volume of his studies titled “Who goes to School? Exploring Exclusion in Indian Education”.

Shyam Menon is a distinguished practitioner of institutional development and renewal in higher education. He was a Professor at the University of Delhi in its Central Institute of Education for most of his academic career. He was the Vice Chancellor of the Dr BR Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) from 2008 to 2018.

He had been Dean of the Faculty of Education and the Proctor of the University of Delhi and earlier Director, School of Education, Indira Gandhi National Open University and Professor at the Central Institute of Educational Technology, NCERT.

He began his teaching career in 1982 at the M.S. University of Baroda, where he taught for several years. His education was at the University of Kerala and the M.S. University of Baroda. He was later at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, as a Fulbright Post-Doctoral Fellow. His work has mainly been in Curriculum Studies, Higher Education and Teacher Education.

He has been on the advisory board of several reputed international journals, including Comparative Education and Asia Pacific Journal of Education. He served on the Task Force on Access and Equity in Higher Education, constituted by the International Association of Universities UNESCO. He has been on several institutions and universities’ boards and academic councils. He is currently the Chairman of the Commission for Reforms in Higher Education, which the Government of Kerala constitutes.

Mr. Vivek Sawant has been the CEO & Managing Director of Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Ltd (MKCL) since its inception in 2001 to 2019. Under his leadership, MKCL has emerged as a high-tech initiative of the Government of Maharashtra and 10 universities in Maharashtra for development and delivery of education, governance and empowerment technologies, solutions and services.

In MKCL, he successfully built a network of around 5420 authorized learning centers across Maharashtra state, the single largest private-public-partnership network of its kind in India, to provide employment and self-employment opportunities in the field of IT to youngsters at their native places.

Under his leadership, MKCL offered its Digital Empowerment services to more than 20 million (2 Crore) common people in several states of India as well as abroad. Today while MKCL has emerged as a self-sustaining, wealth-creating and ever-growing enterprise it is firmly committed to its social responsibility and social accountability.

He has also served on the boards of studies and academic councils of several universities and organizations, such as Maharashtra State Board of Technical Education (MKCL); Rajasthan Knowledge Corporation Limited (RKCL); Odisha Knowledge Corporation Limited (OKCL); Haryana Knowledge Corporation Limited (HKCL); MKCL International Free Zone Establishment, Dubai; MKCL Arabia Ltd, Riyadh; MKCL Malaysia and MKCL Sri Lanka.

He is an honorary fellow of the Maharashtra Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of several awards for his contributions in the fields of education, high performance computing, entrepreneurship development, leadership development and innovation.

Dr Vijaykumar was State Project Director, Universal Elementary Education project (SSA), Tamil Nadu, and was responsible for introducing activity-based learning (ABL) in the entire state, covering 37,486 primary schools and nearly 6.5 million children. He also helped develop and scale active learning methodology (ALM) in all the 12,500 upper primary and secondary schools in Tamil Nadu.

Joining the Tamil Nadu Government civil service in 1975, he served in several important positions, including in the office of the Chief Minister and the Women and Child Welfare and Family Welfare departments. He was the Collector of Vellore and Commissioner of Chennai Municipal Corporation.

Keenly interested in improving learning attainments in elementary education, he conceived and led the ABL project in 264 primary schools in Chennai during his stint as commissioner of the municipal corporation. For this innovation and achievement, he was one among the four IAS officers to receive the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration in 2007-08. As State Project Director, Universal Elementary Education project, SSA, Tamil Nadu (2006-08), he scaled ABL to cover the entire state.

Post-retirement, the Tamil Nadu state government retained him as Honorary Advisor to the Elementary Education Project till 2011. The Government of India has nominated him as a member of the National Resource Group (SSA) for NCERT, New Delhi as well as the Southern Regional Council, NCTE. He also serves as the Union HRD Minister’s nominee in the Academic Council of the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti.