Social Innovations to address the Grand Challenge of School Education in India: Ensuring Quality Education Among Marginalized Communities

This book brings together integrated knowledge on how social innovations can effectively address the societal grand challenge of providing quality school education to marginalized communities in India. The volume explores innovative prosocial models that target marginalized groups, tackling complex issues of gender, caste, class, location, and religious marginalization.
Real-world case studies of social innovation are curated, showcasing novel solutions to persistent educational inequalities. These models offer more effective, efficient, sustainable, and just approaches than traditional methods, aiming for long-term social change by transforming educational organizations, practices, and systems. This book sheds light on the roles of diverse stakeholders – corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, grassroots community efforts, government schemes, and NGOs – in promoting inclusive education.
A critical focus is placed on the dual role of elites in driving both the privatization of education and social innovations, with acknowledgement of how these efforts can sometimes inadvertently undermine public education systems. By examining prosocial organizing and cross-sector collaborations, this volume reveals how innovative school models provide opportunities for girls, religious minorities, marginalized castes, and differently-abled children to thrive.
As such, this book offers valuable lessons for policymakers, educators, researchers, and practitioners seeking to enhance inclusion and improve learning outcomes in government and private education systems, contributing to broader social sustainability and equity goals.

Chapter “Building Bridges: Sharing Cultural Capital to Address the Grand Challenge in School Education” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Ahmad Faraz Khan is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Management Technology, Hyderabad, Telangana, India. He has worked as a Visiting Researcher at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Canada. He previously served as faculty at the Aligarh Muslim University, India. He has volunteered for and served organisations working in primary and secondary schooling in Uttar Pradesh, India. His current research interests include prosocial organizing in education, community entrepreneurship and social inequalities. His research has been published in journals of international repute. His research on school education in India was adjudged one of the best-accepted papers at the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management and published in the Proceedings of the 2023 Academy of Management Meeting. His project on prosocial organizing in school education, has received funding from MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development, India) under prestigious SPARC scheme.

Arjun Bhardwaj is an Adjunct Research Professor at Ivey Business School (Ivey), Western University, Canada. He received his Ph.D. at Ivey and completed Post Doctoral training at Harvard University. Prior to his return to Ivey, he served on the faculty at the University of British Columbia (UBC) at its Kelowna campus for nearly 14 years. His current research interests include societal challenges around quality and inclusive school education and caste and gender inequality. His research has been supported by research grants in Canada (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, SSHRC) and India (Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration, SPARC) and his collaborative research and perspectives have been published in the Academy of Management Learning and Education, Frontiers in Organizational Psychology, Group and Organization Management, Journal of Business and Psychology, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Social and Political Psychology, and Management International Review.

Abdul Azeez. N.P. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Aligarh Muslim University. He has authored three books and edited five and has published several research papers in various reputed national and international journals. His research areas are rural development, digital finance, financial inclusion and financial literacy. His projects on prosocial organising in school education and financial literacy have received funding from MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development, India) and ICSSR (Indian Council of Social Science Research) through prestigious grant initiatives such as SPARC and IMPRESS.

Suhaib Riaz is an Associate Professor of Management at Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Canada. He previously served as faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, United States. His research is focused on societal grand challenges of current and future global significance, and initiatives to address them. His research has been published in journals such as Journal of Management Studies, Organization Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Human Relations, Academy of Management Discoveries, Organization, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and as chapters in Springer and Routledge books. His work has also appeared in Harvard Business Review online, The Conversation, Academy of International Business Insights and has been republished or cited in Businessweek, Huffington Post, Forbes and other outlets. Dr. Riaz has been an invited speaker for panels at Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society, and European Group for Organizational Studies, and a keynote speaker at Boston Field Research Conference. He edited a special issue on economic inequality at Human Relations and currently serves as editor for Global Issues and Business Ethics section at the Journal of Business Ethics and as associate editor at Organization - the critical journal of organization, theory and society.