The people behind Mimamsa
Teaching inquiry and critical thinking asks a lot of the adult in the room. It is always easier to give a child the answer than to sit with them while they work it out. Our facilitators, trainers, and volunteers have chosen the harder, better path of asking the next good question instead of supplying the next piece of information.
Leadership
Sayali Ganu (Sayali Tamane), Co-founder and Project Lead
Sayali brings a decade and a half of experience working with underprivileged communities. After completing her Bachelor’s in Engineering, she moved into the development sector, and went on to earn a Master’s in Educational Technology from the University of British Columbia.
She was in charge of designing ‘Avirata,’ an online training program that reached 40,000 secondary school teachers across Maharashtra. As a member of the Board of Studies for the Maharashtra State Board, she helped create the ‘Self Development and Art Appreciation’ textbooks for grades 9 and 10. For several years, she has devoted herself to educating students from underprivileged backgrounds. She has also been facilitating short term and long term programs on Inquiry for organisations like Maharashtra State Faculty Development Academy, Symbiosis, MIT WPU, to name a few.
Sayali is a core member of ThinQ and has served as the Maharashtra coordinator for Nirman. Alongside her work in education, she is also a writer and filmmaker.
Akash Bhor, Project Manager
Akash is an engineer who found his real calling in the development sector. With over nearly a decade in education, he has been a co-founder of VOPA (Vowels of the People Association) where he led the young organization’s operations and its school transformation program. He has and also to developing early childhood literacy and numeracy content at QUEST, and helping government-school teachers bring tablets into their classrooms with Motivation for Excellence. Today, with Room to Read, he supports library programs across thirty government schools in Delhi.
Running through all of it is a steady conviction: that strong foundations in literacy, numeracy, and reasoning belong to every child, whatever their circumstances. Akash brings to Mimamsa a rare blend of grassroots experience and program craft — a builder of learning experiences as at home mentoring a field team as he is making sense of what the data is telling him.
Pravin Dongawe, Consultant
Pravin Dongawe is a development professional and a graduate of the Post Graduate Programme in Development Management (PGPDM) from SPJIMR, Mumbai. He is deeply interested in strengthening school education and building inclusive, responsive, and sustainable educational systems. His work and aspirations lie at the intersection of education, community strengthening, and institution building, with a focus on enabling communities and institutions to work together towards meaningful and long-term change.
Facilitators
Our facilitators are the heart of every session. They are the adults who guide the thinking without taking it over.
Aditya Padhye
Aditya is a student of Marathi literature from Chiplun, with a deep love for stories and the people who tell them. He has spent one year teaching at a primary school and three years working at a college, experiences that have shaped his connection with learners of all ages. He has a Visharad in Marathi Naradiya Kirtan, a traditional form of devotional storytelling and performance. Aditya especially likes meeting people, listening to their stories.
Shuddodhan Tarkase
Shuddhodhan is a Sociology undergraduate with a background in Mechanical Engineering and a year and a half of classroom teaching experience with 5th–7th graders. His interests lie in social sciences, education, and policy research. He enjoys designing learning experiences and using data to inform decisions.
Akash Ajabe
Akash is a Maths facilitator and statistician drawn to the questions behind the numbers. A Master’s student in Statistics at Savitribai Phule Pune University, he has built forecasting models for Maharashtra’s crops, tracked pandemic trends across India, and explored machine learning for fraud detection at C-DAC. At Mimamsa, he helps children reason their way through mathematics