The first residential camp that The Eka Fellowship ran was a six-day programme, planned hour by hour. Suraj Moraje, Veeran Singh, and their team had prepared a full agenda. They got through the first half day.
“Three kids started crying because they had no clue what we were asking them to do,” Suraj recalled. The team had assumed a level of English comprehension that simply was not there. The students had shot videos in English during the nomination process and spoken reasonably well in them. But following spoken instruction in a camp setting was a different matter entirely. That night, the entire agenda was rewritten from scratch.
It was an early and necessary lesson for Suraj, a former McKinsey Senior Partner who had gone on to lead a 300,000-person organisation, now running a fellowship for students from low-income backgrounds in Bangalore and Pune.
The Eka Fellowship, which he co-founded with Veeran Singh (a Gandhi Fellow and life-long educator), walks with underserved students from the ninth standard until they secure their first job, an eight year commitment built on the conviction that long-term, holistic, and personalised support is what most underserved adolescents are missing.
A Question That Kept Growing
Suraj did not set out to start an organisation. From when he started earning, he would set aside money each year thinking “someday I’d do something good with it.” Clarity emerged over time, and ironically, the seed started sprouting while he was still at Mckinsey.
A 6-year stint in South Africa made him wonder why black and coloured colleagues were not advancing as they should. A young Associate explained what happens when things go badly at work: while a colleague from a more privileged background might go home and be told things will get better, he would be asked why he is going “into a white man’s world” and be advised to return to the township where he will be safe. Suraj was hearing the absence of basic scaffolding, the kind of social and informational support that many people take for granted.
Back in India several years later, he found himself asking a version of the same question. While speaking to The Logical Indian, he said: “In corporate workplaces in India, you rarely have colleagues who have studied at government school (apart from Kendriya Vidyalayas). Almost everyone has some kind of “convent” education. What happens to all these kids who go to government schools or low cost private schools? Why do we not see them in our workplace?” As he dug in, the answer began to look structural.
When the time came to act, Suraj chose to build rather than join. He was 46 and had spent over twenty years in the corporate world, but had never built anything from scratch. More importantly, he and Veeran had a specific problem they wanted to solve, and found no one else solving it in the way they believed it needed to be. Mentors, including Vishal Talreja of Dream a Dream Foundation, helped shape the early thinking. Their first three years were deliberately unmeasured. The only metric that mattered was whether students kept showing up.
Four Barriers, One Programme
Suraj is careful about how he frames Eka’s work. “I don’t call myself an educator. . I don’t think Eka is a typical education organisation.,” he says. ‘In a sense, we ‘also’ do education’. The Fellowship is built to solve for four barriers to socio-economic mobility that he and his co-founder identified.
The first is stratification within schooling itself. International and legacy schools orient students towards ambitious career paths. Government and low-cost private schools often pivot towards skills and jobs. In between sits a large group that falls through. “The Young Lives longitudinal study found that an 80th percentile test-scoring economically underprivileged student ends up in the same place as a 20th percentile richer child in India.” Gifted programmes do not serve this group. Vocational tracks are not the right fit either. This missed-out middle goes largely unaddressed.
The second barrier is language. Many low-cost English-medium schools may claim to teach in English, but the language is not actually spoken. Students can write exam answers through rote memory but cannot hold a spontaneous conversation or give a speech. At the same time, they have not studied their mother tongue in any depth. “There’s actually no language with all-round fluency in which they can stand up and speak in front of a crowd,” Suraj says. “That’s just a fundamental disadvantage.”
The third is the design of most programmes built to help students. Scaled for efficiency, they deliver specific capsules at specific ages, often highly optimised for cost-efficiency. Speaking to students, they observed that many real crises rarely align with predictable timelines. A student fails an exam and stops believing they can study. Another changes colleges between tenth and eleventh grade and cannot navigate the transition. ” Many institutions are doing a great job of helping students in specific phases,” Suraj says, “but few are enabling them to navigate the transition to the next phase. We need to build a relationship of trust with children upfront, so that we have the right to step in and help whenever setbacks happen. And we know, from our own lives, that setbacks WILL happen.”
The fourth barrier is the simplest to describe. “If you or I want to find out what it takes to become a software engineer, we know three people we can call,” he says. For most of Eka’s Fellows, that network does not exist. “Most kids in this group have no one to call. There is no ‘phone a friend’.”
Walking the Distance
Eka’s response is a programme built around continuity. Students are selected at the end of eighth standard and supported across every stage until their first job. The organisation currently operates in Bangalore and Punethough the Pune chapter was not part of the initial plan: e it came about in response to an invitation by another non-profit who wanted to test Eka in Pune. For now, we want to concentrate on Bangalore and Pune only. Depth over breadth. “Quality is the core focus, scale is secondary. ” Suraj says.
Monthly workshops are held not in schools but in co-working spaces, a choice that turned out to matter more than expected. When one girl from the first cohort mentioned she had never pressed a lift button before it shifted something. Many students’ parents work in jobs that bring them physically close to formal workplaces without ever granting access as equal users. Simply being inside such a space, using it as their own, was its own kind of preparation. It has also engendered in them a quiet confidence, that they have as much a right to inhabit such a space as anyone else. Theater and mindfulness sessions reinforce this learning, helping Fellows build presence and better deal with emotional adversity
The career sessions arranged by Eka bring in CEOs, marketers and engineers to talk about their own journeys, choices and career paths. Students also gain information on which entrance exams to write, how to prepare for them, entry cut-offs and other relevant details. . In conversation with The Logical Indian, Suraj noted that what surprises him most is not the information being shared but what the conversations themselves produce. “The moment they come in, a Fellow will unhesitatingly approach them and say, ‘hi, who are you, what are you here for?’. Being able to walk up to people who are clearly from a different social strata, ask questions openly, really unlocks a feeling.”
On aspirations, Suraj is quite candid. Most parents, he says, do want their children to go to college, and many of Eka’s Fellows are among the first in their families to pursue higher education, having surpassed their parents’ education levels by the time they reach eleventh or twelfth grade. “The reason why kids do not end up in college is not to do with a lack of aspiration. It’s to do with a lack of clear pathways.” A student who believes in ninth standard that they must study Arts to become a doctor will study Arts, and only discover the error when it is too late. Psychometric counselling sessions (sometimes made available in schools) are insufficient, he argues. Sometimes, kids are simply left feeling confused by a bunch of graphs and numbers.”
Touching 200 Lives, Personally
Suraj spent two decades advising CEOs of billion-dollar companies. The shift to Eka meant, among other things, persuading the parents of an underserved child to send him/her to a 4-day summer camp. It forced him to reckon with his own deep class conditioning, something he had not fully anticipated before.
Earlier in his career, an exercise he had come across asked him to write ten possible epitaphs for himself. The one that stayed with him was “He touched a million lives.” At Suraj’s previous organisation, he had technically touched more, by financially enabling the families of a workforce of over 300,000 people through the pandemic. Yet, ” it felt like EBITDA management. It didn’t feel visceral at all.”, he observes.
With Eka, the number is currently 200. “I’ve been lucky to have had a 20-year career that positioned me to take this risk. But having the privilege to touch 200 lives, to touch them personally, meet them regularly, know their names, know their stories, and help a little: that feels enriching. . . I’ve experienced immense personal learning and growth myself!”
With the first batch of Fellows now in the twelfth grade, Eka is in its 4th year. The cohort that just completed tenth standard has had great results, with more than half having secured admission in Bangalore’s top three junior colleges. This, despite a selection process that is not based on academic distinction..”
Most mornings, he says, that feels like reward enough.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
India has long debated reservation and skilling as solutions to inequality, but Suraj Moraje’s Eka Fellowship points to something often overlooked: the power of long-term, personalised support in shaping a young person’s trajectory. The fellowship’s approach of walking with students for eight years, through transitions, setbacks, and milestones, challenges the assumption that short-term interventions are enough. With its first batch now in twelfth grade, Eka is quietly testing what depth over breadth can truly achieve.
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