Wednesday
13
August 2025
5:00 PM IST
Location
Room 019, School of Engineering and Applied Science
Central Campus
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Elementary Education: Where do we go from here?
The Nalanda
Rukmini Banerji
Chief Executive Officer
Pratham Education Foundation
Speaker
Pinaki Majumdar
Professor of Physics
School of Arts and Sciences
Moderator
Speaker
Rukmini Banerji
Rukmini Banerji is Chief Executive Officer of Pratham Education Foundation. She pursued a BA in Economics at St. Stephen’s College (Delhi) and attended the Delhi School of Economics. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University (1981-83) and completed her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1991. Dr Banerji worked as a programme officer at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago for several years before returning to India in 1996 to join Pratham as part of the leadership team. Over the years, she has worked extensively in Pratham’s education programs in rural and urban areas. Along with her teams, she has played a major role in designing and supporting large scale partnerships with state governments in India, for improving children’s learning outcomes. Dr Rukmini led Pratham’s research and assessment efforts including the internationally acknowledged Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) exercise from 2005 to 2014 and served as director of the ASER Centre in New Delhi for 10 years. Since 2015, she has been elected the CEO of Pratham. In 2008, Dr Rukmini was awarded the Maulana Abul Kalam Shiksha Puraskar by the Government of Bihar. She was the first recipient of this award. She is also the 2021 Yidan Prize awardee for education development.Originally from Bihar, she is now based between New Delhi and Pune. Dr Rukmini writes frequently on education in both Hindi and English and enjoys creating stories for children.
Moderator
Pinaki Majumdar
Professor Pinaki Majumdar is a professor of Physics in the Mathematical and Physical division of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University. A trained electrical engineer, Professor Majumdar obtained a BE degree from Jadavpur University and an MTech in Solid State Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He then moved to physics, completing his PhD in Condensed Matter Theory at the Indian Institute of Science. Professor Majumdar pursued his postdoctoral work at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. He then joined as a faculty member at Harish-Chandra Research Institute (HRI), Allahabad, in 1998 and worked there till the end of 2024, serving as the Director of the institute between 2017 and 2024. Professor Majumdar's research interests are in condensed matter theory and statistical mechanics, particularly quantum many-body physics. His work spans both method development and model systems relevant to magnetism, superconductivity, and non-equilibrium phenomena, emphasizing strong connections between theory and experiment.
