Key People

Nirmala Thakur is a distinguished education leader with over three decades of experience shaping learning communities across India and the UAE. Her career spans diverse educational roles including teacher, Founder Principal, school head, and mentor, with extensive experience across CBSE, ICSE, IB, Montessori, EYFS, and State Board institutions. This breadth of exposure has given her a rare ability to navigate varied pedagogical philosophies while remaining deeply committed to the core purpose of education—nurturing thoughtful, capable, and values-driven individuals.

Throughout her journey, she has been passionate about educational transformation, curriculum innovation, and building school cultures that place both academic excellence and human development at their centre. Her leadership style is participative, empathetic, and deeply humanistic, grounded in the belief that meaningful education emerges when teachers, students, and families are engaged as active partners in the learning process.

She has played a significant role in mentoring educators, strengthening institutional leadership, and fostering professional growth among teaching teams. Her approach combines practical experience with global educational insights, drawing from internationally respected frameworks such as the Reggio Emilia philosophy and Total Quality Management principles to create inclusive, future-ready learning environments.

Known for her ability to build strong school communities and lead with clarity and compassion, she brings together strategic vision with a deep understanding of classroom realities. Her work reflects a lifelong commitment to reimagining education as a transformative force—one that equips children not only with knowledge and skills, but with curiosity, character, confidence, and a strong sense of purpose in an ever-evolving world.

Jyoti Kumta is an education practitioner and thought leader working at the intersection of values-based education, spiritual development, and contemporary pedagogy. Her work focuses on integrating timeless philosophical insights—particularly from Vedantic thought—into practical, scalable frameworks for modern schools.

With a deep commitment to nurturing the whole child, she designs and facilitates learning experiences that go beyond academic achievement to foster inner awareness, ethical clarity, and responsible action. Her approach places strong emphasis on Inner Listening—the ability to reflect, discern, and act from one’s conscience—as a foundational competency for both students and educators.

She has developed structured models, action plans, and assessment tools that enable schools to embed values and spiritual principles into everyday teaching and institutional culture. Her work includes creating rubrics for long-term projects, collaborative action frameworks for educators, and experiential sessions that translate abstract ideals into lived practice.

Drawing inspiration from initiatives such as Initiatives of Change (IofC) and experiential teacher development processes, she brings a unique blend of personal authenticity and systemic thinking to her work. She believes that meaningful educational transformation begins with the inner development of the teacher and extends outward into the classroom and community.

Her ongoing work aims to build a coherent framework for spiritual development in education, one that is inclusive, adaptable, and relevant to the challenges of the 21st century. Through writing, workshops, and curriculum design, she continues to explore how education can become a space not only for learning, but for self-discovery, character formation, and purposeful living.

Paritosh Chhibber is a User + Service Experience Designer & Entrepreneur who has worked with the data governance, education, cybersecurity, manufacturing, fintech, IT services, wellbeing, total quality management, ecommerce, travel technology, & automotive infotainment domains. As a designer, he has practiced and mentored on various aspects of UX research, modeling, design, prototyping, and validation. As an entrepreneur, he has been building high performance teams and scaling business relationships with global customers.

His professional interests revolve around UX research and the integration of design, psychology, business and now impact. Worked on interaction design and designing for holistic, inclusive and sustainable service experiences which empower and help co-create value for all stakeholders of service ecosystems.

Worked on creating a set of open-source design & development tools to optimize the creation of digital products and services. He has also been involved with product management and marketing functions in several of his previous roles and was responsible for leveraging design thinking to optimise technology enabled solutions, workflows, and delivery.

Thereafter, he started and ran a design studio + outsourced product development company called Locusnine which they scaled organically in a bootstrapped fashion to 50+ people in 3-4 years delivering value to customers globally across the US, India, Europe & Africa. He has since exited the firm & it has been acquired by one of our UK based fintech customers.

After a sabbatical he started a strategy + design + tech consulting business - levelworks.co - where they currently work equally across profit and purpose based projects. On the purpose front, he is passionate about education and job creation.  

Enjoys calisthenics, travel, live music, meditation, mountains, exploring culture, craft & the lovely food of planet earth.

Nitika Pandey is a product manager with ~12 years of experience across data analytics, e-commerce, travel, data governance, and education-focused initiatives, with a career built at the intersection of strategy, execution, and user-centric problem solving. Her work has involved building and improving products, platforms, and digital experiences across diverse contexts—from large-scale commercial platforms to mission-driven education initiatives—giving her a broad perspective on how systems, users, and outcomes connect.

Her experience spans analytical and customer-facing domains alike, including data analytics, e-commerce, travel products, and data governance, where she has worked on translating complex needs into practical, scalable solutions. Across these roles, a consistent thread has been her ability to bring structure to ambiguity, understand stakeholder needs deeply, and move ideas from concept to execution with clarity and focus.

Alongside this, she has worked closely with education-focused organizations and individuals, including helping shape a values-based education platform and supporting an experienced educator in building the product, website, and market presence for a children’s publishing initiative. These experiences have strengthened her conviction that meaningful education transformation requires thinking beyond content delivery or digitization. It calls for a clearer understanding of the child as the end user, the educator as an enabler, and the wider learning ecosystem that shapes outcomes.

She is particularly interested in questions around what education should equip children with in a rapidly changing world—how schools can balance academic excellence with curiosity, communication, critical thinking, values, emotional resilience, and real-world readiness. She brings a product mindset to these questions: starting with user needs, examining systems honestly, and designing interventions that are practical, scalable, and grounded in real behaviour rather than ideal assumptions.