Ritu Jha-
Pratham is going to play a key role in getting children in India to learn about AI.
This was according to AI veteran Vishal Sikka, founder and CEO of Vianai Systems, a human-centered AI platform and products company. He was delivering the keynote at that Pratham San Francisco Bay Area gala.
The May 18 event at the Palo Alto Hills Golf & Country Club drew more than 225 people and raised $650,000.
The gala raised funds to provide learning opportunities to 32,500 children in India.
Sikka said that AI advances, the more people know how to use it, the better it would be.
He pointed out that of the 8.2 billion people in the world, only a little less than 0.2 billion have used ChatGPT. Of those two million could build an AI application, while just 200,000 of that set could run an AI system. Of that 200,000, only about 50,000 could build with ChatGPT or Gemini, and three-quarters of those live within 30 miles of the Bay Area. The rest of the world has the remaining experts.
“It is an incredibly asymmetric situation. It is difficult for me to fathom how a few thousand people are defining our future. The only way that this situation changes is through education,” Sikka said.
Pratham was established in 1994, with support from UNICEF and the Mumbai Municipal Corporation, Dr. Madhav Chavan and Farida Lambay to educate underprivileged children in the slums of Mumbai.
Vandana Sikka[right], who is on the Pratham USA National Board, is the founder and CEO of Learnee, which has a tech approach to education.
“The more access and opportunities we can provide to every student and every young person in the world the better it is,” she said. “All our chapters connect on this common mission – fundraising for all the programming done by Pratham in India. Education is one of the top sectors AI is going to impact. We have to be open to and embrace that change. It can make a huge difference in primary education because AI will help students work at their level. And I think that’s essential for our country.”
Bala Ramakrishnan, co-president of the Bay Area chapter of Pratham who took charge in 2023 has been a board member of the nonprofit organization from 2016, spoke to indica at the event.
“Pratham has become so large and they have so many programs every year I continue to discover things that I didn’t know,” he said. “Pratham has built an app that lets kids ask questions and get answers.”
Ramakrishnan said that Pratham is also increasing its coverage. It had started with students in the slums, then it offered their mothers vocational training. It builds connections with communities and transforms those in many ways.
“We are working on tablet computers preloaded with content for the kids to learn,” he said. “Once they exhaust some content, they go back to Pratham centers, load more, and upgrade their knowledge base. We are also trying to generate offline content because sometimes connectivity is not available. If there is no Internet then the kids cannot download information. So, we are trying to see how to get those kids a preloaded set of information. We are experimenting with many things and a huge study is underway to generate more content for the children.”
He spoke about a Pratham project called PraDigi Lab in Pune.
“Instead of humans alone interacting with the kids, AI bots answer a lot of their questions and nurture them,” he said, adding that Pratham was working with the government to reach children from the third grade through high school.
Balakrishnan said that while the government is trying, there is a large gap between the expected performance and what is seen in student performance.
“That’s where Pratham intervenes,” he said. “Irrespective of the children’s age, based on their learning ability, we put them in groups and then teach languages, fundamental education, and other stuff to help them catch up. Once you remove the language bottleneck the kids take off on their own.”
Sundi Sundaresh, who has been with Pratham since its inception with work in the slums of Dharavi in Mumbai, described how emotional speeches by Yogi Patel of Houston and Bollywood actor Waheeda Rehman, who was then Pratham’s ambassador, convinced him to join the organization.
Sundaresh is also concerned about the academic levels of students. He thought qualified teachers, good infrastructure, and some motivation could help bring children up to their academic grade levels.
He said Pratham was training as teachers, qualified village women who had passed their 10th grade.
“That gives them employment and self-respect,” he said. :It is amazing how Pratam focused not only on the kids’ education but also on the welfare of the women in those villages because they were highly motivated to get their kids properly educated.”
Kalpana Guha, secretary of Pratham USA, told indica about the work the organization with 70,000 volunteers have put in. She said that while they were happy that their first gala in 2008 or 2009, Pratham has raised $650,000 this year.
“It took a lot but with nonprofits, it’s a constant struggle,” she said. “You should stick to your message and what you feel in your gut because that’s important. You have to be passionate about the cause that Pratham represents.”
She cited the case of Pratham’s Second Chance initiative, for girls and women who could not complete their education.
“That initiative is doing extremely well,” Guha said. “We have a lot of older women joining. After that, we have a vocational training initiative that teaches them to start a business. We have trained some women to become mechanics, others to work on construction sites, things they never thought they would ever do. But they got a chance and they liked what they were doing. So, they decided to become electricians, construction workers, and regular auto mechanics… We are empowering the women and youth to do that.”
