Kruti Bharucha

Across India’s government schools, children are present but disconnected from learning. While children physically attend school, they often do not actively participate or meaningfully engage with what is taught. As a result, learning remains superficial, and students rarely develop a genuine understanding or curiosity for their subjects. Kruti Bharucha is shifting the center of gravity from attendance and enrolment to engagement. She is transforming the purpose of public education by embedding active, student-centered instruction into the heart of classroom practice and system delivery. Her organization, Peepul, strengthens governance systems to improve engagement within schools – laying a new foundation of educational equity.

India’s education crisis is no longer about access. With nearly 98% of children between the ages of 6 and 14 enrolled in school and the average attendance in government schools standing at 76%, the real question is: what kind of learning are they experiencing once they’re inside the classroom? Kruti Bharucha surfaces a foundational insight that reframes how we understand the learning crisis: India has built schools, staffed them, and filled them, but it has not created the conditions for children to take ownership of their learning.

For millions of children in government schools, the classroom is a place of passivity. They are expected to listen, not to question; to absorb, not to explore. Most education reforms focus on what content children should learn, but Kruti reframes the question: how do we create classrooms where children learn in environments that centre their voices, build belonging, and foster deep engagement? Kruti is reimagining the purpose of public education by shifting enrolment and attendance focused systems into engagement enabling systems, revolutionizing the system towards student engagement by aligning training, monitoring, and accountability systems across thousands of schools.

Kruti’s breakthrough idea is to position student engagement and belonging in public education system as the foundational lever for education reform. Learning doesn’t happen through infrastructure or enrolment alone. It happens when children are emotionally, cognitively, and socially engaged. A growing body of global research shows that the ‘soft infrastructure’ of schools, i.e., teacher behaviour, feedback, and classroom culture have a direct link to learning outcomes. Kruti’s innovation lies in making this invisible infrastructure visible, measurable, and scalable within the public school system.

She brings this idea to life through a deeply embedded systems approach. It begins by showing what high-engagement classrooms look like. Kruti then influences state governments to embed these practices across thousands of schools by aligning training, monitoring, and accountability systems. The model is not just about what teachers do, but is about how the system supports them to do it consistently and well. Through learning circles for teachers she creates a community of practice with supportive peers, where educators reflect on classroom experiences, exchange strategies, and co-develop solutions to challenges they face in delivering engagement and belonging-led instruction. Kruti’s organisation has created real-time dashboards with instant report generation to provide government officials with actionable insights. These are actively shared with teachers and school leaders to help them tailor instruction to students' learning needs.

The transformation lies in how Kruti changes the frame of government education system to reimagine their own role, from administrators of process to architects of meaningful classroom transformation. Kruti treats the government education system not as end-users but as co-creators of system transformation. This is exemplified in Madhya Pradesh, where the government education system has helped the Ed (education) schools adopt a teacher development model, drawing from Kruti’s approach. Over 300,000 teachers as of 2025 have undergone a state-led shift that repositions their role from passive content deliverers to facilitators of high-engagement learning. In Delhi, they set up a learning lab experience by transforming three once-empty public schools into vibrant learning environments which are now being used by education departments as reference points for system-wide reform.

Through this work, Kruti is reframing the purpose of public education. She is moving it from a system just focused on enrolment and attendance to one that puts engagement, equity, and ownership at the core of every classroom.

While India’s public education system is among the largest in the world, it is one of the most disconnected from the lived experience of children. Despite enormous strides in access, with nearly every child enrolled in school, the actual learning outcomes remain alarmingly low. Government schemes such as mid-day meal scheme had increased school enrolment and attendance in schools but learning outcomes still need a lot more student engagement. National assessments show that more than half of Grade 5 children cannot read a Grade 2-level text. Classrooms, especially in government schools, often operate on rote memorisation and compliance. They prioritise curriculum coverage over comprehension, attendance over attention, and outputs over ownership.

Multiple studies, including the Annual Status on Education Report (ASER), show that even when children attend school regularly, the lack of interactive, student-centred teaching leaves them disengaged. The 2024 ASER survey highlights this crisis: 77% of Grade 3 students do not have basic reading skills, and 62% do not have at grade foundational arithmetic skills. By Grade 5, these figures improve slightly to 45% and 31%, respectively, but remain alarmingly low. If these learning gaps are not addressed at the foundational stage, it becomes increasingly difficult to bridge them later, leading to student dropouts as they struggle with growing academic demands.

Across India’s 1.5 million schools, which enrol 248 million children, teachers are central to the classroom experience but are rarely treated as instructional leaders. Their professional development is severely limited, often reduced to infrequent, theory-heavy training sessions with minimal practical relevance. Research indicates that fragmented and inadequate professional support directly affects teaching quality, leading to lower student achievement and engagement. Without consistent mentoring, coaching, or feedback, teachers struggle to adapt or innovate, perpetuating passive, compliance-based classrooms that hinder children's academic and personal growth. A growing body of scholarship underscores how India’s teacher-training ecosystem remains fragmented and under-resourced.

Shiba Singh and Pragya Gupta’s 2021 study on continuous professional development (CPD) traces its evolution from the 1980s to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 era and finds that most in-service programmes are still delivered as “rigid, one-off workshops” with almost no mentoring or follow-up, leaving teachers to shoulder accountability without practical support. Complementing this diagnosis, Karthik Muralidharan’s 2019 chapter in What the Economy Needs Now argues that India’s pre-service Bachelors of Education (B.Ed.) and Diploma in Elementary Education (D.El.Ed.) courses over-emphasise theory and exam preparation, calling for a national mission that prioritises hands-on pedagogy and classroom practice instead. Most recently, a 2022 critical meta-analysis by Mishra and Panda reviewed 74 CPD evaluations across South Asia and found that fewer than one-fifth of Indian programmes provide sustained mentoring and that impact evidence is “largely missing or methodologically weak,” confirming persistent structural gaps in both design and measurement of teacher training. School leaders, too, are treated more as administrators than academic coaches. There are few ecosystems that support teachers to grow, adapt, and lead change from within their classrooms. As a result, the classroom remains one of the most underleveraged levers for transformation, one where students are present but disconnected, and their ability to contribute meaningfully often remains untapped.

Kruti’s journey to transforming public education began in 2017, when she turned around an under-resourced government school in Lajpat Nagar through a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) with the South Delhi Municipal Corporation (SDMC). This turnaround involved dramatically transforming teaching methods from passive instruction to active student participation, guided by clear academic mentorship and consistent classroom feedback. Teachers used instructional techniques such as think-pair-share, grouping by learning levels, structured questioning with wait time, and real-time feedback loops. These techniques were chosen because they foster participation from all children, not just the fastest responders, and make learning visible for teachers in real time. Rather than creating parallel systems (like private or NGO-run schools), Kruti believed the only way to achieve this transformation at scale was to co-create with large public education systems run by the state governments. To address this gap, she founded Peepul in 2017 and developed its framework in the subsequent year.

Each classroom was supported by low-tech, context-responsive tools such as question planning templates, student response trackers, and peer reflection checklists. Teachers received clear lesson routines and learned how to vary instruction based on student responses. Academic mentors regularly observed classrooms using structured rubrics and provided targeted feedback. These inputs were tracked through dashboards, enabling school leaders and system officials to identify patterns, trends, intervene early, and share successful practices.

Within just one year, the school saw dramatic improvement in enrolment, from 9 students to over 200, generating a waiting list, an uncommon occurrence for government-run schools. Motivated by this success, Kruti expanded her model to two additional schools in Delhi, establishing a network of three exemplar schools serving nearly 1,500 students. These schools invited attention from different leaders in the education systems and soon became beacons of excellence, guiding broader educational reforms by demonstrating what active, participatory, student-centred classrooms could look like within existing government systems.

By 2019, recognising the power of Kruti’s approach, the Government of Delhi adopted the engagement-led model for scale. With government adoption, this approach rapidly expanded to reach 787,735 students, 17,793 teachers, and 1,533 schools across Delhi, embedding Kruti’s core insight into the governance structures of the public education system.

Building on the momentum in Delhi, Kruti began cultivating relationships in Madhya Pradesh in 2019, a much larger state with nearly 100,000 government schools spread across 52 districts. Here, she envisioned creating an "exemplar district" as a scalable unit of systems change, demonstrating the Peepul Framework’s effectiveness in transforming education delivery across thousands of schools. School leaders and qualified teachers in this district were supported through systematic monitoring, structured classroom observations, clear accountability mechanisms, and motivational initiatives like teacher rewards and recognition programs.

In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic struck and schools temporarily closed, Kruti saw an unprecedented opportunity. With students at home, she doubled down on enhancing the abilities of teachers by upskilling them. Leveraging DIKSHA - a national digital education platform initially used primarily for textbook distribution - she rapidly scaled her teacher development playbook and modules. Initially rolled out to around 20,000 teachers in the exemplar district, these digital courses on DIKSHA quickly expanded across Madhya Pradesh, reaching approximately 300,000 government teachers and influencing pedagogical practices for over 9.75 million students statewide.

Beyond digital training, Kruti expanded her interventions significantly to include peer-learning communities ("Shaikshik Samwad"), structured mentorship through classroom observations, in-person pedagogical training, and teacher recognition initiatives ("Hamare Shikshak, Hamare Prernashrot"). Through this comprehensive, multi-modal approach, she aimed to create a robust, state-owned teacher ability enhancement development ecosystem. Madhya Pradesh subsequently developed its first state-wide Teacher Training Policy, deeply informed by research and practitioner input, institutionalising the Peepul High-Engagement Framework within government systems.

By 2023, this approach reached a national stage, with Madhya Pradesh’s teacher training practices showcased as exemplars for other states across India. The teacher training playbook and modules developed by Kruti’s team on DIKSHA became national assets, shared widely with other states. The Peepul High-Engagement Framework thus became embedded not just in district or state policy but also recognised at the national level as a model for reimagining classroom engagement across India's public education system.

By 2025, students in Delhi's three exemplar schools show learning outcomes five times higher than those of comparable government schools. In the scale model, Grade 6 Hindi proficiency increased from 25% to nearly 40%, and Mathematics from 9% to 17% within a year. In Madhya Pradesh, teachers have completed digital ability enhancement modules and courses with an average completion rate of 84%. Dashboards and academic mentorship practices developed through these programs have been adopted and replicated by the state to guide performance management, training cycles, and instructional priorities. The Delhi exemplar schools have achieved over 75% grade-level proficiency and have been recognised as among the Top 10 Schools globally by T4 Education for innovation in public education. The dashboards generated through their systems and processes help decision makers at every level to constantly improve what could be changed in enhancing student experience and belonging at the school. These results illustrate Peepul’s ability to embed lasting instructional reform within the public education system.

Through this careful, stepwise strategy, from exemplar school to exemplar district, from state adoption to national recognition, Kruti has ensured that the shift from passive attendance to active, participatory learning is not merely possible but inevitable.

Fifteen years ago, Kruti Bharucha became a mother. Her son was fortunate to be supported by a teacher who saw his potential. With empathy, adaptation, and interactive teaching strategies, that one educator helped him engage, recover, and grow. But Kruti knew that millions of children across India never get that one teacher, that one chance. And she wasn't okay with that. That moment seeded her life’s work: to build an education system where every child, regardless of circumstance, is seen, engaged, and supported to learn meaningfully.

Kruti had worked across some of the world’s most influential institutions. At McKinsey, she supported strategy in consumer goods and agri-business sectors. At the World Bank, she worked on a $500 million fiscal reform program in Uttar Pradesh. At the IMF, she helped design a financial reform index for emerging economies. She then led CEB’s Finance Practice in India, where she worked with CFOs and senior leadership teams across the private sector. These roles gave her deep insight into how systems are designed, financed, and reformed.

Kruti's educational background ranges from an MSc in Development Studies (with Distinction) from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MA in Economics from the University of Maryland and a BA (with Honors) from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi where she was ranked number 3 in the entire University.

In 2010, Kruti helped launch ARK India to improve education for underserved communities. ARK focused on running high-performing government partnership schools, and while the results were strong, Kruti realised that improving outcomes in a few schools would not be enough. To make change last, she would have to work with the system and transform how governments enable learning across classrooms. This led her to start Peepul, a platform to build institutional capacity, embed engagement-led instruction, and support governments to reimagine how education is delivered. Today, Peepul is influencing governments to embed best teaching practices and strengthen system ownership of classroom change, ensuring that every child can experience quality education not as an exception, but as a norm.