Ashok Kamath

Ashok Kamath left a corporate career to work on children's education, and has since been central to two Bengaluru organisations: Akshara Foundation, which he has chaired since July 2008, and the non-profit children's publisher Pratham Books, which he co-founded.

An alumnus of IIT Bombay, he was managing director of the Indian operations of the semiconductor company Analog Devices before moving into the development sector. In 2004 he set up Pratham Books with Rohini Nilekani and Rekha Menon; it was designed to close the shortage of affordable reading material in Indian languages, on the argument that children cannot learn to read without books they can actually get hold of in a language they speak.

At Akshara Foundation, established as a public charitable trust in March 2000 and conceived as a partnership between government, the corporate sector and voluntary organisations, Kamath has worked on programme strategy and on taking work to scale through state school systems rather than around them. The foundation's early reading programme Oduve Naanu, piloted in Bengaluru schools, was adopted by the Karnataka government across some 46,000 schools in 2008; its mathematics programme Ganitha Kalika Andolana, launched in 2015, was designed for millions of children, and the Karnataka Learning Partnership built a public data platform on the state's elementary schools. The foundation reports having reached over seven million children in Karnataka, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

IIT Bombay gave him its Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2013 for his work in child education. He received the Namma Bengalurean award in April 2019 and the Satyendra K. Dubey Memorial Award in 2023, and is also a trustee of the Shreyas Foundation in Ahmedabad.[2][3][4]