Nilesh Nimkar is the Founder Director & CEO of Quality Education Support Trust – QUEST.
Nilesh Nimkar has a simple yet powerful belief that quality and equity in education must go hand in hand. For Mr Nimkar, this has meant focusing his life’s work on strengthening and revitalizing the public education system, so that it works effectively for each child, especially those on the margins.
A young Mr Nimkar began his journey as a schoolteacher in a rural residential school operated by Gram Mangal, an NGO in Maharashtra. There, teaching children from tribal communities, he began developing right-brain creative approaches for inclusive learning, The challenge was to respect the linguistic and cultural background, of each child, in the classroom. Through this initial experience, the key Lesson Learned by him was that there are deep structural inequalities in the Indian education system. Being an optimist, he recognized the potential for transformative change. His mission: Pedagogy must be responsive, as well as rooted, in local realities.
A passionate educator, Nilesh Nimkar used these insights to establish QUEST, a not-for-profit organization. In 2007. In Sonale, a small village in Palghar district in Maharashtra.
QUEST has a lazer sharp Mission: Improving the quality of education in schools that cater to children from under-served communities in rural and tribal areas. Post establishment of QUEST, Mr Nimkar chose to live in and work from Sonale, so as to stay rooted in the communities he serves.
What began as a small initiative, has now grown into an intervention that has impacted more than 3 lakh children, over 12,000 educators, and thousands of public institutions, including Anganwadis across three states and 11 districts.
We congratulate Nilesh Nimkar. Our Qimpro Gold Standard 2025, for Education.