Why foundational skills and frontier science must grow together to close India’s learning gaps.

India has made remarkable strides towards development since Independence. In the past decade alone, the country’s education and innovation landscape has transformed at record speed. Between 2014 and 2023, Indian Institutes of Technology have expanded from 16 to 23, medical colleges have doubled, and the total number of higher education institutions have seen an increase by 13.8 per cent. India’s social sector has kept up — private philanthropy is at an all-time high, with education attracting 40% of all private funding. The India Nonprofit Report 2025 notes that non-profits mirror this prioritization — 75% of Indian NGOs work on quality education, and early childhood and school education form one of the single largest focus areas across the sector.

Yet, even with this momentum India’s education system continues to hold two parallel realities. On one end of the spectrum, India is positioning itself as a global hub for AI, semiconductors, biotechnology, and advanced research — as a country brimming with scientific promise. On the other end, millions of children in government schools continue to struggle with the foundational literacy and numeracy needed for meaningful progress. It is perhaps our response to this contradiction, much more than others, that will determine whether India’s development aspirations over the next decade are achievable or merely aspirational. 

The scale and consequences of the education challenge

This learning crisis is neither recent nor straightforward. India has long produced a remarkable roster of scientists, doctors, engineers, and researchers, many of whom today lead global institutions and cutting-edge enterprises. But alongside these successes sit some worrying numbers. While enrolment numbers look promising, year after year, data shows that basic reading and arithmetic abilities remain alarmingly low. In several states, Class 5 students struggle to read text meant for Class 2, and by Class 8, the gap becomes nearly impossible to close.

These deficits translate directly into lost opportunities, for children, and for the country. Early learning difficulties calcify into diminished confidence, poor comprehension, and a limited ability to engage with subjects like science and mathematics. And this is happening just as the demands of India’s labor market are evolving rapidly. Over 60% of Indian employers report a shortage of skilled technology and research professionals, even as the need for talent in fields like AI, clean energy, and biotechnology accelerate.

The mismatch is clear: India is nurturing ambitions for high-end science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) leadership while several of its young people are stalling on the very first rung of the learning ladder. 

Philanthropy that works across the continuum

A handful of philanthropic efforts, however, are working towards bridging the different gaps in India’s education challenge — from foundational learning to frontier science — through interventions spanning specific needs. For instance, the Palsamudram Family Trust, co-founded by Sanjay and Sangna Palsamudram, offers a useful lens into how distinct educational philanthropic efforts, housed within a single family trust, can together address multiple problem areas in India’s learning landscape. Their method acknowledges that millions of children are struggling with the basics while others lack the platforms required to reach the cutting edge of global research. Therefore, over the years, the founders of the Trust, Sanjay and Sangna have come to support interventions across the entire arc of learning — from strengthening English skills among primary school students to enabling high-schoolers to access advanced STEM education or compete on global platforms like the International Science and Engineering Fair.

At the foundational level, Step Up for India — co-founded by Sangna — responds directly to the early-grade literacy crisis by equipping government schoolteachers with structured, bilingual curricula that are cost-free and designed for scale, with more than 700,000 children having benefited so far. Then there are initiatives that support scientific ambition early on. The Research Science Institute, India, supported by Sanjay at the Indian Institute of Science, creates pathways for gifted young researchers who often lack access to high-quality labs, mentors, or financial support. By modelling the six-week, fully funded programme on the prestigious MIT version, RSI India opens the doors to cultivate the scientific ambition that India must work towards if it is to lead in frontier technologies.

Complementing these initiatives that widen India’s STEM pipeline in more inclusive ways, the Palsamudram Trust is also closely involved with IRIS, a national initiative that encourages high school students to undertake scientific research projects. Recognizing the urgent need to close India’s gender gaps in STEM, the Trust also supports programmes such as KaLiSu STEM-for-Girls, which equips bright young women from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities with hands-on research experience.

While these initiatives emerged independently, their combined effect points to the value of engaging with education as a long-term continuum. Taken together, these interventions underscore the idea that education, besides being a vital indicator of development, is also the cultivation of curiosity, confidence, and competence in young India. A child learning how to read an entire page in one go and a teenager running experiments in a lab in Bengaluru may seem worlds apart but the objective is the same — to nurture independent, creative thinkers, capable of shaping India’s development story. And it is where the long arc of impact becomes most visible — with early interventions becoming the bedrock for the grandest aspirations. 

The way forward

India today is at a crossroads. We have the demographics, the ambition — and, increasingly, the political narrative around education, innovation, and global competitiveness. But demographics and ambition without equitable opportunities will dilute existing efforts without making a dent in the problem at hand. What we need, then, is alignment: between access and quality; between early-stage learning and late-stage opportunity; between social justice and global competitiveness. The Palsamudram Family Trust’s efforts, while independent, together offer a compelling illustration of what such breadth can look like in practice. In tackling both foundational literacy and frontier science through separate initiatives, it signals something important: that India’s transformation cannot be partial. We need both breadth and depth. Full-spectrum philanthropy — long-term, risk-tolerant, and oriented to both foundations and pipelines — is precisely the kind of catalytic capital that can help stitch these pieces together at a system level. Recent philanthropic and sectoral reports show the appetite and the gaps; the challenge is to move capital and policy toward outcome-oriented, multi-year investments that the learning arc demands.

If the past decade was defined by infrastructure, inclusion, and digital progress, the next decade presents an incredible opportunity for nurturing human capital. As India pursues the Viksit Bharat agenda with 2047 on the horizon, an important marker of its success will be whether children leave school able to read, reason and experiment — and whether its young people will have easy access to research and innovation ecosystems. And while philanthropy cannot replace state actors, it can take risks the state cannot, scale models the state can adopt, and build ecosystems that will eventually become self-sustaining. Strengthening the bottom of the learning pyramid and widening the top both need equal attention. Done right, this would be nation-building at its most constructive.

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