Rukmini Banerji is the Chief Executive Officer of Pratham Education Foundation.

She has extensive experience in design and delivery of education interventions and has played key roles in developing and implementing Pratham’s partnership programs with governments. Over the years, Rukmini has led assessment activities of Pratham including setting up an internal measurement, monitoring and evaluation unit. For ten years, from 2005 to 2014, she was the Director of ASER Centre, Pratham’s autonomous research and assessment unit, which conducts the well-known, nation-wide Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) survey. Rukmini has been with Pratham since 1996 and took over as CEO in 2015.

Initially trained as an economist in India, she did her B.A. at St. Stephen’s College and attended the Delhi School of Economics. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1991.

Rukmini writes frequently on education in both English and Hindi and enjoys telling and writing stories for children. Originally from Bihar, she now lives in New Delhi.

Wilima Wadhwa has been Director of ASER Centre and, since July 2015, has taken over as Head of the Centre. She has been associated with the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) since its inception in 2005. She is the architect of the ASER survey and other primary research studies currently undertaken by ASER Centre. ASER’s unique approach to measuring learning outcomes has been recognized nationally and internationally and has also been adapted by several other countries in Asia and Africa. Dr. Wadhwa earned an undergraduate degree, with Honors, inEconomics from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University, post graduate degrees in Economics from Delhi University and University of California, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California.She has been published extensively and teaches statistics and econometrics at the University of California (Irvine), and the Indian Statistical Institute (New Delhi). She has also been a member of various government committees, including the Working Group for the Revision of Wholesale Price Index Numbers, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India.

Wadhwa’s other research interests include development and monetary economics.