Ashok Rathod

Founder

Ashok Rathod is the founder of OSCAR Foundation [1], an Indian non-profit working on sports and education from Mumbai.

Ashok Rathod is the founder and chief executive of the OSCAR Foundation, a Mumbai-based sport-for-development organisation that uses football to keep children from low-income communities in school. He grew up in the Ambedkar Nagar settlement in Mumbai and began the work there in 2006, when he was eighteen, by gathering eighteen local children for weekend matches.

The organisation's central rule is 'no school, no football': children who take part in its coaching are expected to stay in formal education. OSCAR was registered as a charitable trust in 2010 and by 2025 said it worked in 131 locations across Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Goa and the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, having reached about 40,000 children and young people.

Early life and education

Rathod was raised in Ambedkar Nagar, a slum settlement in Mumbai, where he saw children leaving school to earn money and, in some cases, drawn into drug use and crime. He dropped out of college in his second year, having been schooled in Hindi and finding English-language lectures difficult to follow.

Career

What began as informal weekend football grew into a structured programme. By 2009 about 150 children were taking part. The first cohort of the organisation's Young Leader programme, in which older participants are trained to coach and mentor younger children, started in 2011, along with the first girls' team.

In 2012 Rathod set up an affiliated chapter, OSCAR International, in the United Kingdom with Stuart and Dan Lawson. The foundation partnered with the FIFA Foundation from 2013 and opened its first Digital Learning Centre in 2014. A disability inclusion project, Enabling Change, began in 2018, and a partnership with Manchester City Football Club followed in 2020.

In 2024 the foundation published a sport-for-development curriculum handbook for government school teachers in Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, and in 2025 it extended its work to Goa.

Recognition

Rathod received the Real Hero award from CNN-IBN and Reliance in 2010. In 2017 the footballer Juan Mata, co-founder of Common Goal, named OSCAR as that initiative's first member organisation.

He was selected as an Acumen India Fellow in 2021. In 2024 he received the Badlav Humse Hai award from AU Bank and Moneycontrol, and in 2025 he was named a Changemaker by Democratic Sangha at its annual forum.[2][3][4][5]

OSCAR Foundation

OSCAR Foundation is a Sports for Development nonprofit that uses football to keep children in school, enforcing a 'No School, No Football' policy alongside an AIFF-accredited coaching curriculum and life-skills training. Since 2010 it has grown to 131 locations across Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Goa and Daman and Diu, reaching around 40,000 children.

OSCAR Foundation reports the following, on its own site: