Pooja Singh

Singh was born in 1991. She studied mass communication and video production at Karim City College, Jamshedpur, and has taken a certificate course with the Creative Movement Therapy Association of India. She has said her grandmother shaped her early interest in social work.

Singh took up a Gandhi Fellowship in 2013 through campus recruitment at Jamia Millia Islamia, and later worked at the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, which is known for its work on design thinking in education.

She co-founded Kshamtalaya Foundation in 2016 with Vivek Kumar and Alokesh Sharma. The three spent time living in communities in Kotra, where schools were often closed and dropout rates were high, and concluded that children there had considerable practical knowledge that formal schooling did not recognise. The organisation went on to build learning models drawing on experiential learning and social-emotional learning, and to work with school leaders, local governance, parents and school management committees rather than with classrooms alone.

Singh has served as co-chief executive of the foundation and directs Hausla Circle, a mental well-being programme for teachers run in partnership with the State Council of Educational Research and Training in Rajasthan. She has also worked on the I Discover fellowship, which trains local young people as education leaders in Kotra and Gogunda in Rajasthan and in Samastipur in Bihar, and has contributed to the state curriculum framework prepared under the National Education Policy 2020.

By 2025-26 the foundation reported working in 155 schools across three states, with 204 fellows.

Singh was a Dalai Lama Fellow, a one-year global leadership programme run jointly by the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia and the Renée Crown Wellness Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder.[2][3][4]