In the year 2006, a couple of months before deciding to pursue a study and career in medicine in the United States, Sandeep Rai looked in the mirror and asked himself a hard question. Was he pursuing medicine because he truly wanted to, or because it offered financial security and a path he had always known? The honest answer sent him in an entirely different direction, one that has now shaped two decades of work in education across two countries.
Sandeep is the founder of The Circle India, a Mumbai-based organisation that incubates social entrepreneurs who are building innovative schools and after-school programs for children from low-income communities across India. Before this, he spent 14 years with Teach for India, helping build the organisation from its founding days. His journey, from a classroom in Washington D.C. to communities across the length of this country, is driven by a single conviction: that poverty does not have to dictate destiny.
The Pivot That Changed Everything
When Rai walked away from the path of medicine, the question he found himself asking was deceptively simple. “If I really want to make the world a better place, what’s the biggest thing that I can be doing?” The biggest problem, he felt, was poverty and the stark inequity between the haves and have nots across the world. And the biggest thing one could do in pursuit of addressing that, he concluded, was to fix education.
In 2006, he joined Teach for America and was placed at a school in Washington D.C. that, by most measures, was struggling. It ranked near the bottom among 238 schools in the district, had a history of grave safety issues and had seen years of poor learning outcomes. And yet, what Rai witnessed there stayed with him. “My kids in that school, I think, did things that I just never would have thought would be possible,” he said. “They achieved things that the world never would have thought would be possible.”
That experience gave him two foundational beliefs. First, that poverty is real and its impact on people is far harder than most can imagine. And second, that despite that, children from low-income communities are entirely capable of learning, thriving, and changing the world around them. What they need are schools that actually work. And making schools work, he found, boils down to two things: the quality of the teacher, and the quality of the school leader.
From America to India
In 2008, Rai moved to India and joined Teach for India, which was just launching at the time. He spent 14 years there working on a central challenge: how do you get better talent into a system that is in deep crisis, not just in teaching, but across the education sector more broadly?
The answer, he came to realise, required more than what any single organisation working within the existing system could offer. About four years ago, he founded The Circle India. The idea was not to build one chain of schools, but to unlock local leadership through entrepreneurship and incubation.
While speaking to The Logical Indian, Rai explained why that model made sense for India specifically. “India is such a diverse country and to really be able to basically solve educational inequity, if we want schools in every pocket of this country, we have to unlock local leadership. The best way to unlock local leadership is through entrepreneurship.”
What The Circle Does
The Circle runs three main programs. The first is The Circle Incubation, a two-year, fully paid programme for entrepreneurs who want to design, launch, and run schools or learning centres for children from low-income communities.
Entrepreneurs who join it work with coaches and facilitators, visit high-performing schools, attend workshops, and build the skills needed to fundraise and sustain their ventures over time.
The second is The Circle U, an aspiring school of education that prepares and trains a new generation of educators to serve low-income communities. Through our flagship One-year Certificate Program, we equip educators across India with data-driven teaching practices and coaching support, to really see transformative outcomes.
The third is The Circle Labs, which hosts workshops, experiments, hackathons, and guest speakers across the year, and also offers innovation grants for teachers who want to explore reinvention in their own schools and classrooms.
The concept of incubating schools as a nonprofit was new in India, and Rai acknowledges that it took time for people to understand what The Circle was doing. “We really want schools to run well. We have to treat them like science,” he said. “And so there is a science to how you run schools. There is a science to how you start schools. It cannot continue to be a scattered process.”
A Rigorous Search for the Right People
The Circle’s Incubation has a selection rate of 6% for its yearly cohort of entrepreneurs. The process is intensive and spans several months. Rai and his team search extensively, visit sites, study models, and conduct multiple rounds of interviews and assessment centres before selecting anyone.
What they look for is a specific combination of qualities: a deep commitment to equity for underserved communities, a background as an excellent teacher, the ability to influence others, genuine commitment, and a capacity for solving complex problems.
In conversation with The Logical Indian, Sandeep explained the reasoning behind this. “We believe that some of those essential ingredients eventually make for excellent entrepreneurs,” he said. “And then to be able to find and pressure-test those skills, we run multiple days of assessment centres and several rounds of interviews. We also get shortlisted candidates to run an 8-week pilot in their communities, with weekly observations and debriefs. So we spend a long time getting to know the people before we actually incubate them. We realize finding the right person, the right entrepreneur is a hard yet important task.”
What Reinvention Actually Means
When The Circle talks about reinventing schools, it does not simply mean building something new and calling it innovative. Rai describes reinvention as sitting at three axes.
The first is genuine innovation, for cases where something is broken and no existing solution works. The second is restoration, recognising that there was much that was meaningful in how India educated its children a century ago, and asking whether those things can be revived. “There was so much that was sacred and how India was educated if you go back a century. Can we revive that?” The third is the adoption of best practices from other parts of the world.
The Circle is also guided by global frameworks like Transcend’s “Six Leaps to a 21st Century Education,” a framework that captures a shift from rote learning to rigorous learning, from irrelevant content to relevant content, from one-size-fits-all approaches to personalised learning, and from a narrow academic focus to a more holistic one.
Stories From the Ground
The Circle’s first cohort began with nine entrepreneurs, some building schools and others building after-school programs, located across the country.
One entrepreneur is building high-quality schools in Uttar Pradesh, about 90 kilometres outside Kanpur, working with hundreds of students and developing a model for what good schooling can look like in Tier 3 and Tier 4 towns. Another program, called Panaah Communities, operates in Pune and works with children at risk of dropping out, helping them re-enter and access the formal education system. It now reaches more than a thousand children across the city.
A school in Jalalabad, near Bareilly, is run by a woman who was the first in her family to leave her marriage and the first to attend college. She returned and started the school as a proof point of what high-quality education can look like for children from her own community.
Other examples that Rai points to include a programme in Mumbai called Nazaria, which teaches young people from marginalised communities media and filmmaking skills. Students from that programme are already working in media careers and winning awards for films they have made on social justice issues.
A school called Pi-Kademy, also in Mumbai, was identified by the Government of India as a social innovation worth studying. A school outside Kanpur sees its students jumping grade levels in academic assessments. And a program in Hyderabad is focused on getting young women and minority community members into colleges and careers in technology, with students already entering the sector.
What the Children Teach Him
Rai has spent considerable time with children from low-income communities across the country. What he finds, again and again, is not hopelessness but desire. “Kids want to learn. Kids want to succeed. Parents want kids to succeed,” he said. “Kids are capable of doing a lot more than we as adults give them credit for.”
He also speaks about the importance of staying close to the communities one is trying to serve. “We have to be willing to be proximate, to learn more, to listen more to communities around us,” he said. “And what proximity means is that we have to be willing to spend time listening to kids and communities, spend time bearing witness, even when bearing witness is hard.”
What Two Decades Have Taught Him
After 20 years in education, first as a classroom teacher, then as an institution builder, and now as a founder working with entrepreneurs, Sandeep has arrived at a few clear convictions.
He believes that working in this space requires a sense of abundance and a deep belief in the goodness of people. He believes that solving a problem of this scale requires the willingness to take big risks for children. He believes the work demands creative solutions. And above all, he believes in staying proximate to the communities at the centre of all of it.
“I wake up every morning feeling like I’m fighting a fight that needs to be fought,” he said. “There are people that this is impacting, and it is real.”
The problem, he adds, is also genuinely complex. And that, alongside everything else, is what keeps him going.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
At a time when conversations around education often remain limited to policy and infrastructure, The Logical Indian believes stories like Sandeep Rai and The Circle India’s matter because they shift the focus back to people, teachers, school leaders, and local changemakers working closely with communities.
Their work highlights that meaningful change in education cannot be imposed uniformly across a country as diverse as India; it has to be rooted in empathy, proximity, and local leadership. By investing in grassroots entrepreneurs and rethinking what schools can look like for children from underserved communities, The Circle India offers a powerful reminder that education is not just about classrooms, but about dignity, opportunity, and the belief that every child deserves the chance to thrive.
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