Mazin Mukhtar

Mukhtar, who is from the United States and had been working on school reform there, moved to India in the mid-2010s. He met Parmita Sarma, a graduate of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, while working on a school project, and the two set up Akshar Forum in Pamohi, near Deepor Beel on the outskirts of Guwahati, opening with about 20 pupils from low-income families.

In October 2018 the school introduced a policy under which pupils bring a quota of plastic waste collected from their homes and neighbourhood each week instead of paying fees. The stated aim was to stop the routine burning of plastic in the surrounding area, which had been filling classrooms with smoke. Waste is processed at the Akshar Recycle Centre, where non-recyclable plastic is compacted into 'eco-bricks' used for pathways and small structures on the campus.

The curriculum pairs academic subjects with vocational work — carpentry alongside mathematics, solar technology alongside physics, recycling alongside ecology — and pupils sit certification through the National Institute of Open Schooling. Older pupils teach younger classes for a small honorarium. Mukhtar has described the objective as building 'a creative pipeline from school to employment'. He and Sarma later began an Akshar Fellowship programme intended to place trained graduates in government schools.[2][3][4][5]