Sanjay Dalmia

Founder

Sanjay Dalmia is the founder of Open Links Foundation (2017)[1], an Indian non-profit working on education from Pune.

Sanjay Dalmia is an Indian technology executive turned social entrepreneur who founded the Open Links Foundation in 2017, a non-profit organisation working to improve the quality of teaching in Indian government schools.

The foundation, registered under the Bombay Public Trusts Act, is best known for tickLinks and its successor platform Vinoba, which give teachers lesson plans, digitised assessments and a peer community, and which are run in partnership with state education departments and district administrations.

Education

Dalmia holds a B.Tech in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and a postgraduate diploma in business administration from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad.

Career

Dalmia spent more than twenty-five years in the corporate sector, including as chief executive and managing director of Fundtech India Ltd between 2011 and 2016, where he also led trade services work in financial technology.

He took early retirement to set up the Open Links Foundation in 2017, saying he had been prompted by the writing of Gurcharan Das, with the aim of making government schools aspirational by supporting and motivating teachers. The foundation released the first version of tickLinks in 2017 and worked with institutions including the Ramakrishna Mission and DAV schools in Chennai.

In 2019 the foundation launched tickLinks 2.0, an open-source mobile application for teachers, in partnership with the Bharti Foundation; the app carried more than 9,500 lesson plans for classes 1 to 10 in mathematics, science and social studies in English and Hindi, and was used by teachers in Satya Bharti and government schools.

The work has since been consolidated into the Vinoba platform, which combines teaching resources, digitised assessment and support to district administrations. The foundation reports operating in districts across Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Bihar, covering more than 55,000 schools and 185,000 teachers as of 2025.[2][3][4][5]

Open Links Foundation

Open Links Foundation works to improve the quality of education in government schools at scale, on the view that low teacher motivation and weak programme implementation — not spending or teacher qualifications — are the binding constraints. Headquartered in Wanwadi, Pune, it runs the Vinoba platform, which connects teachers to their peers, recognises and motivates them, and gives district administrators data and tools, alongside digitised assessments, on-site district support and back-office IT, data and content support.

Open Links Foundation reports the following, on its own site: