About Peepul
India’s public education system often struggles to enable the teacher or create a meaningful teacher-student interaction. Typically, it offers neither a conducive environment for teaching, nor enough resources, nor avenues for pedagogical development.
What’s in our name?
Our organization is named after the Peepul tree, which holds great significance in Indian culture. Lord Buddha is believed to have attained enlightenment under a Peepul tree. Perhaps because of this reason, it is considered the tree of wisdom and its shade has served -and still does in some regions - as a setting for open classrooms.
Peepul trees have deep roots and foster a nourishing environment around themselves. As an organization, we aim to be exactly that for our children: a steadfast presence around which they can thrive and learn.
We believe it is fitting that our name resembles "people", considering we are a people-centric and people-first organization that empowers teachers to transform classroom learning and puts children's interests at the centre of everything we do.
All our actions are driven by what is best for the children we work for.
Kruti Bharucha is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Peepul. In the initial stage of her career, she has worked in leadership positions at multiple organisations. Her decision to pivot to the education sector was rooted in her own experience as a parent. She was concerned that the quality of education in India did not give every child a fair shot at a good life. She realised that the gross socio-economic inequality in our society impacted the ability of parents to mobilise support for their children and the public education system of India was their only bet to grow out of poverty. That is when she decided to utilise her skillset as an executive to create impact at scale by catalysing the entire public education system.
In 2014, she took small but consistent steps to work closely with the public schools in India under the Exemplar Schools Project. Today she manages a portfolio of 7 programmes spread across Madhya Pradesh and Delhi, where more than 10% of our children can hope for better educational outcomes.
