Meera Kulkarni
Solapur, MaharashtraFinished the electronics track on a shared phone, one module a night. She now maintains the diagnostic equipment at the district hospital and teaches the same track to her cohort.
Knowledge was never meant to be sold.
Takshila Foundation runs free, open courses taught by verified educators — and pays those educators properly. No fees for learners. No unpaid teaching. Both halves, or the argument does not hold.
A foundation, not a marketplace.
Takshila Foundation was set up on a plain observation: the people who teach are the people who earn least from teaching. Every platform that promised to fix that eventually charged the learner. We took the other route — fund the educator, keep the classroom free, and publish what we spend.
Named for a school that charged nothing.
Takshashila taught for centuries without tuition. Students arrived, studied under a teacher who was kept by the community, and left. We are not claiming its lineage — we are borrowing its arrangement, which worked for far longer than ours has.
Mission
Keep learning free at the point of use, and make teaching a livelihood rather than a donation of someone's evenings.
Vision
A generation that learns without debt, taught by educators who were never asked to work for exposure.
01
Free at the point of use
No fee, no trial, no locked module. If a learner has to reach for a card, we have failed the premise.
02
Teachers are paid
Every hour taught is an hour compensated. Volunteering is welcome; unpaid labour dressed as opportunity is not.
03
The books stay open
What comes in, what goes out, what it bought. Published quarterly, including the quarters that look bad.
04
No theatre
No streaks, no badges, no countdowns. Those exist to hold attention, not to teach — we would rather earn the hour honestly.
Dr. Ananya RaoFounder & Trustee, Takshila Foundation
“I was asked to teach for exposure for eleven years. Exposure does not pay rent, and it never taught anyone anything either.”
I taught physics in a district college for eleven years. In that time I watched capable students leave — not because the work was beyond them, but because the fee was. I also watched colleagues leave, for the opposite reason: teaching paid too little to stay.
Both of those are the same problem seen from two ends. A platform that solves only the first ends up asking teachers to donate their labour. A platform that solves only the second ends up charging the student. The arrangement has to hold both, or it collapses into the thing it replaced.
What the arrangement has produced.
The arrangement only means anything if it can be checked, so these are reported as they stand — including the parts that look bad. Nothing here is rounded up.
Learners48,120Enrolled across all open courses since 2019.
Volunteers1,284Community mentors, translators and moderators.
Free courses340Published and permanently free. No tiering.
Villages reached612Offline-first delivery in low-connectivity districts.
Certificates issued22,940Verified completions, issued at no cost.
Paid to educators₹4.2CrDirect compensation. Never equity, never exposure.
Provisional figures. These are internal counts and have not been independently audited. They are published here because the arrangement should be checkable, and they will be replaced by audited numbers rather than quietly corrected.
Irfan Sheikh
Murshidabad, West BengalCame in for the maths refresher, stayed to translate it. Forty-one modules in Bengali, and the Bengali cohort is now the second largest on the platform.
Lakshmi Devi
Warangal, TelanganaTaught weaving economics as a volunteer, then as a paid educator once the course found its audience. Her cooperative's bookkeeping course is the most completed course we host.
Where this has gone, and where it is going.
Six years in, with the part that matters still ahead: an endowment large enough that the free classroom stops depending on next year's fundraising.
- 2019
The foundation is registered
Three educators, one room in Pune, and a rule written into the trust deed: the learner never pays.
- 2020
First twelve courses go live
Recorded on borrowed equipment during the lockdown. Every educator was paid, which meant the founders were not.
- 2022
Knowledge partners open up
Educators publish on their own terms and are paid per hour taught. The model stops depending on goodwill.
- 2024
Offline-first delivery
Courses sync to low-end devices and run without a connection — the districts that need this most have the least bandwidth.
- 2026
Mentorship & innovation
In progressLearners bring problems from their own districts; mentors and builders help ship the answer. In progress now.
- 2028
A self-funding endowment
PlannedThe end state: educator pay funded in perpetuity, so the free classroom never depends on next year's fundraising.
The people who are answerable for it.
A small staff, a larger bench of mentors, and advisors who are paid to disagree with us in writing.
Leadership
- Dr. Ananya RaoFounder & Trustee
Physics, eleven years in a district college. Wrote the rule that the learner never pays.
- Vikram IyerDirector, Programmes
Built the offline-first delivery model after a year of field testing in Warangal.
- Sana QureshiDirector, Finance
Publishes the quarterly ledger. Has refused three grants with strings attached.
Mentors
- Rahul MenonMentor, Engineering
Takes the hardware track and the questions nobody else wants at 11pm.
- Fatima NoorMentor, Languages
Runs translation. Forty-one modules in Bengali started on her insistence.
- Joseph ThomasMentor, Livelihoods
Cooperative economics, taught to people who run cooperatives.
Advisors
- Prof. Nandita BoseAdvisor, Pedagogy
Thirty years in curriculum design. Argues with us, usefully.
- Arjun PillaiAdvisor, Governance
Keeps the trust deed honest and the auditors unsurprised.
Rooms where this actually happens.
Workshops, recording days, translation sprints and the occasional rollout that needed a generator.
2024
2024
20234:12
2025
20252:38
2025
2025
2024
20236:04
2024
2025
2019
20203:21
2025
“I did the whole track on a phone I share with my brother, one module a night after the shop closed. Nobody asked me for a rupee, and nobody made me feel like a charity case either.”
Meera KulkarniLearner, Solapur