Priya Nadkarni

Founder

Founder of Mrida Education and Welfare Society

Priya Nadkarni is the founder of Mrida Education and Welfare Society [1], an Indian non-profit working on education and tribal welfare from Mandla.

Priya Nadkarni is the founder and president of the Mrida Education and Welfare Society, an Indian charity working with tribal children in the Mahakaushal region of Madhya Pradesh. She heads fundraising and finance at the organisation.

Mrida runs education, sport and technology programmes for children from Gond and Baiga communities in districts around Mandla, an area with high rates of school dropout, seasonal migration and child malnutrition.

Early life and education

Nadkarni holds a BA in economics and statistics from St Xavier's College, Mumbai, a diploma in journalism from the Asian College of Journalism in Chennai, and an MBA from the Indian School of Business.

Career

Nadkarni worked as a journalist with Business Standard in Mumbai, writing on capital markets, and later at Unitus Capital in Bangalore, where she advised social enterprises in microinsurance, microfinance and education on raising capital.

In 2012 she joined a large non-profit to help build an employability programme in Mandla district, Madhya Pradesh. Working with PRADAN's grassroots programme for tribal youth there, she concluded that skills training alone did not hold, because young people placed in city jobs often returned within months without the foundational schooling to sustain the move.

She founded the Mrida Education and Welfare Society in 2016 to address that gap, building an education model rooted in the children's own environment and drawing on the athletic and spatial strengths of the Gond and Baiga communities to develop sport and technology pathways. She has more than a decade of experience working with tribal communities in Madhya Pradesh.[2][3]

Mrida Education and Welfare Society

Mrida Education and Welfare Society works with tribal and underprivileged children across the Mandla, Dindori and Balaghat districts of Madhya Pradesh's Mahakaushal region, running grassroots education, sports, nutrition and livelihood programmes reaching over 1,500 children across 50 villages.

Mrida Education and Welfare Society reports the following, on its own site: