Alaka Sarma

Founder

Alaka Sarma is the founder of Akshar Foundation [1], an Indian non-profit working on education and environment from Guwahati.

Alaka Sarma is an Indian academic and the co-founder, managing trustee and chief executive of the Akshar Foundation, an education charity based in Guwahati, Assam. The foundation was registered in 2013 and she established it with Parmita Sarma and Mazin Mukhtar, who are its founding trustees.

The foundation's principal project is Akshar Forum, a model school for children from low-income families opened in Guwahati in 2016, whose curriculum combines conventional schooling with vocational training, environmental work and a peer-teaching system. The foundation has since worked with government to extend the model to state schools in Assam.

Career

Sarma is described by the Akshar Foundation as its chief executive and managing trustee, and by Royal Global University as an academician and co-founder of the foundation.

The Akshar model aims at the eradication of poverty through education, and seeks to convert government schools into self-sustaining communities in which students learn to earn a living, start enterprises, undertake development work in their villages and take on environmental projects. The foundation has undertaken a programme to introduce the National Education Policy 2020 framework into a hundred government schools across Assam in partnership with government.

Speaking at Royal Global University's Leadership Conclave in 2025, Sarma argued that children from marginalised backgrounds should be raised as givers of help rather than seekers of it, and spoke about the alienation of children who lack parental attention.[2][3][4]

Akshar Foundation

Akshar Foundation, founded by Mazin Mukhtar and Parmita Sarma, runs the Akshar Forum school in Pamohi, Guwahati, where students bring plastic waste as school fees, recycle it on campus, and earn while they learn through a vocational model inspired by Gandhi's Nai Taleem. The model has drawn global attention and is being adapted in government schools.