Arjun Shekhar

Founder

Founder of Pravah · Co-founder of ComMutiny - The Youth Collective

Arjun Shekhar is the founder of Pravah (1992)[1] and ComMutiny - The Youth Collective (2008)[2], Indian non-profits working on education and livelihood from New Delhi.

Arjun Shekhar (born 20 April 1965) is an Indian social entrepreneur, organisational development practitioner and novelist. He is a co-founder of Pravah, a Delhi-based organisation working on youth citizenship and leadership, and of ComMutiny – The Youth Collective, a network of youth-focused organisations that Pravah incubated in 2008. He also founded Vyaktitva, a performance and organisational development consultancy.

Early life and education

Shekhar is from Jalore in Rajasthan. He studied at Delhi University and the Delhi School of Economics, taking a master's degree in economics, and then graduated from XLRI Jamshedpur in 1990, where he captained the cricket team.

Career

After about seven years working in the corporate sector, Shekhar founded Vyaktitva, an organisational development firm that provides leadership development, coaching and people-management support to companies, non-profit organisations and individuals.

He was a founding member of Pravah and later served as president of its board. Pravah works with young people on self-awareness and social action, and Shekhar's contribution has centred on designing structured learning experiences and leadership curricula for the social and corporate sectors. He was also a co-founder of ComMutiny – The Youth Collective, a community of practice bringing together youth-engaging organisations across India, where he is described as a design champion.

Writing

Shekhar has written two novels, both published in India: A Flawed God (2010), a corporate satire, and End of Story?, a thriller about a journalist and subliminal advertising. He is also a co-author of The Ocean in a Drop: Inside-out Youth Leadership (2013), written with Ashraf Patel and others, and of ComMutiny – Sparking an Inside-out Youth Revolution.[3][4][5][6]

Pravah

Pravah is a youth-development nonprofit operating across 15-plus Indian states that builds young people's leadership capacities to drive social change. Its programmes span adolescent life-skills development, youth civic engagement, early-stage social-entrepreneur support through its Changelooms programme, and capacity building for partner organisations, reporting reach to over 500,000 young people.

Pravah reports the following, on its own site:

PrayaSapna curriculum run across 1,860 NYKS teen clubs, impacting 35,000 adolescents across 5 states (with UNFPA)

ComMutiny - The Youth Collective

ComMutiny - The Youth Collective (CYC) was registered as a trust in 2008, formed jointly by Pravah and Sir Ratan Tata Trust to bring together development organisations and educational institutions working with young people. It functions as a community of practice for youth-work organisations across India, aiming to develop self-aware, proactive young citizens it calls 'Jagriks'. In 2019 it established the cross-sectoral vartaLeap coalition, partnering with development organisations, government bodies, media, corporations and UN agencies to mainstream youth-centric development.

ComMutiny - The Youth Collective reports the following, on its own site:

ComMutiny - The Youth Collective's ecosystem in 2024-25 comprised 2,240+ members and 154 partner organisations across 19 states, coordinated through vartaLeap