Dr. Shruti Agrawal is an educationist. She has a deep sense of compassion and care for special needs children. For the past two years she has devoted her time to understanding the nuances of teaching a special needs child and in conjunction with therapists implementing ways for effective teaching, learning, and development. She believes that every child is different and there is no one way or right way to teach special needs children. You need to tailor your activities for each child if you truly want them to learn, grow, develop, and become independent people. She believes that teaching special needs children may test your patience and your nerve, but your endurance will reap sweet results.

Dr. Agrawal completed her PhD in environmental education from University of Florida at Gainesville. Florida is a wildfire-prone area, and her dissertation focused on looking at the effectiveness of educational programs in reaching out to the community and suggesting strategies to improve them. She co-authored several publications and developed outreach materials for local communities. Prior to her research at Florida, she worked at Centre of Environment Education (CEE) in Ahmedabad where she was involved in developing educational materials for teachers and children on a variety of environment related topics. One of her books NatureScope India, Spotlight on Species: Endangered Elephants has been translated-adapted in nine Indian languages. In the aftermath of the 2000 earthquake she worked with her peers to help children cope up with their trauma.

Dr. Agrawal has presented at various national and international conferences in environment related fields. She also has in-depth experience in research, program design and implementation, writing publications, proposal and grant writing, outreach, and program evaluation in various fields.

Dr. Binod C. Agrawal is an educationist and international communication expert. Originally trained in anthropology, he has a PhD from University of Wisconsin, Madison. He taught in Iowa State University in an agricultural institute and got involved with the social evaluation of world famous Satellite Instruction Television Experiment (SITE) and evolved qualitative methods for communication research. His earliest co-authored book was published by UNICEF in 1987 “Television and the Indian Child”. He has over 40 years of teaching, research, and consulting experience in multi-disciplinary fields of education, communication, architecture, design, and planning. In recognition of his research work and research leadership in Asia he was awarded by AMIC in 2009.

Dr. Agrawal has published over 20 books and fifty research papers in national and international journals and has lectured in many parts of the world. He has been a major advisor for undergraduate, graduate and PhD students in a large number of Indian universities in a variety of fields such as architecture, communication, design, and education. He is a prolific writer and researcher.

Dr. Agrawal is the Founder Director of Mudra Institute of Communications Ahmedabad; TALEEM Research Foundation, Ahmedabad and Himgiri Nabh Vishwavidyalaya (University in the Sky), Dehradun. He has been an invited speaker at a large number of international and national seminars and conferences and a speaker on children and television on which he has written extensively.

Mrs. Agrawal is an MBA from NMIMS, Panipat. She is the Managing Director and Founder of Excellez which provides one-to-one online tutorial to students of grades 3rd to 12th. She pioneered the online tutorial program for American students from India.

Mrs. Agrawal has worked with Electrotherm, Ahmedabad and also at the Aviation training program. She has a great deal of international experience as a self-taught interior designer and apparel designer.

Mrs. Agrawal is very concerned about the welfare of young children and provides moral and intellectual support to AANCHAL. She is a native of Ahmedabad, Gujarat and has spent a large part of her life in the United States working in entrepreneurial business. She brings with her innovative approaches for AANCHAL.

Dr. Rajiv Bathla started his own hospital, Shradha Children and Neonatal Hospital in Bopal Ahmedabad in 2002. Since the last 8 years, he has been doing his private practice at this hospital as Child Specialist and Neonatologist. This is a fully equipped, 15 bed children hospital.

Dr. Bathla did his graduation (M.B.B.S.) in 1996 from B.J. Medical College, New Civil Hospital, Ahmedabad. He completed his post graduation (M.D. Pediatrics) in April 2000 from the same institute. He completed Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS) course in April 1999 and was recommended for PALS Instinctualship course. He also successfully completed Neonatal Advanced Life Support (NALS) course in April, 1998. His areas of interest are Infectious Disease and Vaccination. 

Smt. Shashi D. Bhatt is the Co-Founder and Principal of Sri Ram Vidyalaya. She has extensive experience in the field of child education. She is a very efficient teacher and organizer, and independently runs her school.

Since 1995, Smt. Bhatt has administered a successful special education program along with the normal education in her school. The program aims to provide an educational platform to students suffering from learning disabilities, behavioural problems or mental limitations. It is an effort to develop the social and academic skills of special needs students and focuses on making such students independent and capable enough to carry out their basic needs and actions in life. This project had a modest beginning on 22nd November, 1999 with only 4 students. Since then it has developed into a bigger program providing high quality and personalized education to 45 students.

Smt. Bhatt’s vision is to increase the awareness and compassion for the mentally challenged children in India. She hopes to pave way for a smoother life for the special needs children. In this school, mentally challenged students are given opportunities similar to the normal students along with the special attention and care, which they require. All this is done without ignoring the importance of the basic formal education which is usually neglected for such students. 

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Mrs. Priya Kale has a passion for teaching and sharing knowledge with others. She has been doing this for over 35 years. She started her work by teaching sewing and embroidery to women in Ahmedabad in 1973. She taught English at the Vandana High School in Ahmedabad from 1974-1977.

After going to Bangalore in 1977 she started teaching women sewing and embroidery again. She taught children at a school managed by the ASC Service Center from 1978- 1980. She got interested in teaching hearing impaired and started teaching at the Sheila Kotawala Institute for Deaf. Here she taught arts, craft, tailoring and English. While working there she completed her diploma in teaching hearing impaired children and obtained the Bachelor of Education degree from Annamalai University, Chennai. She had worked at the Sheila Kotawala Institute for the Deaf from 1980 – 1987. To work with the hearing impaired children she had to develop skills of teaching English in a phonetic manner. After returning to Ahmedabad she started teaching women tailoring again and continued that for quite some time. She started teaching at Mount Carmel High School. She also started working with the Ahmedabad Blindmen’s Association for teaching the vision impaired children.

After coming to Pune in 1994 she started her work here with the Bal Kalyan Kendra to teach physically handicapped children about the Arts and Crafts. Later she worked for two years with the Springdale School in Aundh, Pune to help children as a remedial teacher. She had developed a liking for teaching English and she got a very good opportunity to work with the Formulasys Academy. The work involved teaching Korean Students who had come to Pune to learn Information Technology through English. She had taught there for over two years. After that she taught conversational English to a very large number of young Korean students.

Prof. Prerana Mohite has over 25 years of experience teaching undergraduate and graduate level courses in early childhood care and education, trends and issues in human development, seminars on measurement evaluation, learning disabilities, communication, guiding children’s development, and research methods. She is a member of national and international professional organizations such as, World Organization for Preschool Education; Indian Association for Preschool Education; International Society for study of Behavioural Development; and Home Science Association of India.

Prof. Mohite has been a supervisor to several M.Phil. and Doctorate students. She has received various research grants on early childhood development projects related to evaluation, developing and field-testing educational materials and children and television, to name a few. She is well-published author in many national and international journals. She has developed and tested various tools to evaluate children with learning disabilities, and assess development, basic competencies and reading and writing skills of children of different age-levels.

Prof. Mohite is very involved at the state level and is a member of the State Resource Group for Distance Education, Gandhinagar, Govt. of Gujarat; Member and Consultant, State Resource Group on Gender and Education, Gandhinagar, Government of Gujarat. She has also received honours at both the national and international arena.

Mr. Nitin S. Parikh has more than 30 years of experience in the accounting industry. He specializes in accounting, auditing, financial consulting and project management. Mr. Parikh has worked as an auditor to government corporation, government undertaking, corporate sector and has had various categories of assignments of banking. He has also performed systems checking and verifications in a number of industries on behalf of banks. Mr. Parikh is an auditor for large government corporations, large trusts, Public schools and the four largest nationalized insurance companies. He is the only chartered accountant in Gujarat who has been a management consultant to the Orrisa Government on behalf of World Bank.

In addition to his professional commitments, Mr. Parikh has contributed his time to social work by serving the local community through one of the largest social organization of the world, the Lions Club International, specifically District 323B. He has been actively involved in the Clubs main service activity and has remained the chairman of various service projects in administrative capacity.

Mr. Parikh has contributed to his profession by being the Office bearer in various senior-level capacities of the Ahmedabad branch of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. This is the 2nd largest branch in the country and has a representation of 4000 members.

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