Opening Keynote by Roshni Nadar Malhotra | 5th Annual IC3 Conference

Thank you. Thank you so much for the warm welcome. I was just thinking to myself that last time I was in a room with so many teachers, I was up to no good. It's truly an honor and a privilege to be here. I was also looking at your list of schools and thinking to myself that four of the schools, the three Shiv Nadar schools I'm a trustee of, I've seen since inception. The Vasan Valley school I was a student in the founding batch, so I've seen it since inception. In fact, Ms. Rekha Krishnan, who's here, was my history teacher and class teacher. So she's seen me pretty much since inception too. And it doesn't help that my husband turns around and tells her, 'Oh, you're tormentor in chief.' So I said no. But I'm highly privileged to be here. Through my own journey and through the Shiv Nadar Foundation, one has had tremendous exposure to educators, especially the power that you all play in the formative years of a student.

I find India very interesting. Since independence, there has been a surge of great higher education institutions in the country, whether it's the IITs, other national institutions, private universities like Shiv Nadar University, our own SSN College of Engineering, Laksha, Ashoka, Korea. But the investment and envisioning around what private schools can be in the nation is something I still find lacking. I think we've got great schools, but most of them still exist in the urban milieu, serving urban children from relatively well-to-do backgrounds. There is much to be desired from our national government schools. With this thought process, about 11 years ago the Shiv Nadar Foundation established two residential schools in Uttar Pradesh called the Vidyagyan Leadership Academies. They're not in your list, but it was a very humble mission for us, for myself personally. Uttar Pradesh has 200 million people, that's almost the seventh or eighth largest country in the world by itself, but on index of poverty and education it is fairly low for the country.

I graduated and came from a very privileged school. My mother went to Sonar, most of her family went to Doon School. So the question was: if you were to provide exactly the same tools that I got in school, what we give our children in our urban schools, if you were to provide exactly the same ingredients, what can you do with rural underprivileged children but meritorious? And how can it change their life? I found it an extremely interesting challenge. We induct children at the age of 10 or 11, boys and girls, strictly rural, with families of annual income one lakh and below. We perhaps at the foundation run one of the largest private search processes in the country. We test 250,000 children every year and we induct 400. So that is in percentage terms probably even much less than what an MIT or Harvard or IIT does. Then these children stay with us for seven years and graduate in CBSE in English, and go on to the same universities where students are coming out from the educational institutions you all represent.

I'm extremely humbled and excited. Our first student this year went to Stanford with a hundred percent scholarship. Last year our first student went to Cornell. We've got students at Rochester, Purdue, Wellesley. In India, the NITs, the IITs, of course Shiv Nadar University, Ashoka, SSN College of Engineering, and Laksha also when our students apply. It challenges the notion that children from underprivileged backgrounds, given the same tools as we are collectively giving to children from urban areas with educated parents, can achieve great things. For me, it's been a great journey. I am not an educator by profession, I'm not even a technology person by profession, but here I am in different roles. This year, I'm sure a lot of you would have read the newspaper: the Class 12 national topper of CBSE was Anusuya Kushwaha. Most people said she was a laborer's daughter. She was a Vidyagyan student. Mr. Banerjee is here, who is our founding principal of Vidyagyan, and we've got four or five Vidyagyan students here as well. Please interact with them. They are students right now at Shiv Nadar University, I believe? Oh, graduates? I'm so old. Okay, so they're graduates, and I'm extremely proud of them. We've got our first batch of students who've also graduated from universities in the US.

It's just an interesting… there they are. And Mr. Banerjee, where are you? There you are. He's been the founding principal of Vidyagyan, the first school in Bulandshahr, 90 kilometers from Noida. The second school is in Sitapur, about 90 kilometers from Lucknow. It's really been a humbling journey for me and for the foundation. In the foundation we get to have Shiv Nadar School and then Vidyagyan, and get different perspectives from students from different backgrounds. Yet Shiv Nadar School is also doing CBSE, Vidyagyan is also doing CBSE, and the students are graduating together. We try to create enough opportunities for the students to meet as well.

As counselors, as what we do at Vidyagyan and Shiv Nadar School, I think the only way that students today can even survive as young adults in the world that exists is if you actually continue being a student. My dean at Kellogg, when I graduated from business school, said, 'Roshni, the day you stop learning, you start aging.' I said, 'Well, I don't plan to age.' So he says, 'Then I guess you have to continue learning.' So I think my only thought, I'm not here to give you a lesson, would be that if we can just continue to keep training all our students to constantly continue being students, even at the workplace, always humble enough to admit that they don't know everything, that they still have much to learn, learn from peers, learn from work, challenge yourselves. I guess that you'll be the right kind of restless without being completely mad in this mad, mad world. So thank you so much. I thought that since most of you will not be able to visit Vidyagyan, I mean you can at some point and I'd love you to, but I have a little video just to show you a bit of the campus, a bit about our kids. Thank you so much for having me here. Thank you.