Gurumurthy Kasinathan

Founder

Gurumurthy Kasinathan is the founder of IT for Change [1], an Indian non-profit working on human rights, education and women & children from Bengaluru.

Gurumurthy Kasinathan is one of the founders of IT for Change, the Bengaluru research and advocacy organisation that works on digital technologies and social equity, where he is a director and leads its public education technology work. He came to the sector after fifteen years in business, at A. F. Ferguson Management Consultancy Services and then at i-flex solutions, now Oracle Financial Software Services, and moved into development work with the Azim Premji Foundation, which deputed him to the policy planning unit of the Karnataka education department.

His work at IT for Change is built on a single argument: that if technology is going to enter Indian public education, it should strengthen the state school system and its teachers rather than bypass them, and it should run on free and open-source software and open educational resources so that public money is not converted into dependence on proprietary platforms. He leads the organisation's education projects across research, demonstration programmes in schools, systemic teacher education reform and policy advocacy, with a particular focus on teacher professional development and on educational leadership. He has been a visiting faculty member at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai and Hyderabad, teaching on its courses in ICT and education and in education leadership and management.[2][3]

IT for Change

IT for Change is a Bengaluru-based non-profit working on digital technologies and their bearing on human rights, gender equity and social justice. It carries out research and policy advocacy on data governance, artificial intelligence and the platform economy, and runs field programmes in public education and with rural women through its Prakriye field centre. It holds Special Consultative Status with the UN Economic and Social Council.