Amit Mehta, CEO, Maa Foundation, Gujarat, manages a charitable organization funded by the Bilakhia family. The mission of Maa Foundation is to induce educational reforms in society that are scalable at a national level. The visible results delivered by Maa Foundation, a professionally managed organization, are traceable to the focused efforts of Mr Mehta. A tough but humane manager.
Mr Mehta, a chemical engineer, hung up his corporate boots after 14 years of professional success, to accept the leadership mantle at Maa Foundation. His passion to contribute to society has enabled Maa Foundation to serve thousands of children, parents and teachers over the past 5 years.
Mr Mehta leads a team of 350 young, energetic and highly zealous individuals, from diverse educational backgrounds. He runs Maa Foundation as a company, with the synergy of a NGO, and with total professionalism. The pilot projects adopted by Maa Foundation have been in Valsad, Bhavnagar and Amreli in Gujarat.
One of his earliest projects was in rural India, where children drop out from schools owing to the poor quality of education. Unfortunately, they do not realize the importance of education. This issue gave birth to Project Ken, which involves deploying intensely trained, educated unemployed local youth as full-time para-teachers in the rural government schools of Valsad district. Currently, 267 educational officers are working in 300 rural schools, impacting the lives of approximately 60,000 students enrolled up to standard 7.
In addition, a unique Project Vikas focuses on grooming numerous rural arts graduates with essential hard and soft skills to increase their employability. Further, but more basic, Project Parvarish offers children career counseling, in order to give them a sense of direction in life. Mr Mehta. Committed to education, training and development.
A left brain thinker, with strong right brain emotions, Mr Mehta has leveraged the advantages of technology by developing Samarthan, a free portal which provides educational information to the academic community. Maa Foundation has also designed special software to help the management of schools, as well as to track the performance of students. He clearly has scalability of education on his agenda.
Mr Mehta. A techno-socio leader.
We congratulate Mr Amit Mehta, Qimpro Gold Standard 2010 for Education.