The turning point in Chetan Kapoor’s life did not arrive through a grand plan. It began with questions he could no longer ignore. Despite having an MBA from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade and a promising corporate career, Chetan Kapoor found himself wondering whether professional success and a comfortable life were enough. Years later, that search for meaning would lead him into the social development sector, where he has spent 25 years working towards a more inclusive society.
As CEO of Tech Mahindra Foundation, Chetan Kapoor has been associated with initiatives spanning education, employability, teacher training and disability inclusion. His journey, however, began with an opportunity he had not even known to look for.
From Corporate Life to a Calling
Chetan graduated from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in 1995 and began his career in the corporate sector. The role brought professional opportunities and international travel, but it also prompted him to reflect on what he wanted from life.
“I have always placed the importance of purpose as something which is very significant in one’s life. For me, somehow, it was never about just having a large bank account; it was more about how I’m spending every day, every hour, every minute of my life, which was more important to me,” he said.
After around two years in the corporate sector, Chetan left his job to support his father, who was going through a difficult phase in his small business in Patna. During this period, he began teaching students preparing for MBA entrance examinations. Teaching gave him a sense of meaning that he had struggled to find elsewhere.
He returned to Delhi in 1999 and continued teaching as a freelancer. In 2001, a friend introduced him to a couple who had returned to India from the United States and wanted to establish an organisation for children with developmental disabilities.
Chetan admitted that he did not know much about the social sector at the time. Yet, after reading their concept note and meeting Dr Vibha Krishnamurthy, a developmental paediatrician trained at Harvard, he found himself drawn to the work.
That opportunity led him to help establish Ummeed Child Development Center in Mumbai in 2001. His responsibilities included building the organisation from scratch, making decisions about its legal structure, recruiting people and setting up its operations.
One memory stayed with him, a three-year-old girl, Sakina Lokhandwala, regularly visited the centre for therapy. Chetan recalled her cheerful nature and the presence of her mother during the visits. These everyday encounters helped him recognise the value of the work he had chosen.
He later moved to Pratham, one of India’s largest education NGOs, after being selected for an initiative supporting professionals working with the organisation.
Building Pathways Through Education and Employability
Chetan’s association with Tech Mahindra Foundation began before he formally joined it in 2016. In 2012, his consulting outfit, Edulever, was commissioned to work as a knowledge partner to develop the foundation’s skills development programme, SMART, which stands for Skills for Market Training.
The Tech Mahindra Foundation was established in 2006 with a clear mandate: “Empowerment through education.”
For Chetan, education and employability are not separate destinations but connected stages of a person’s development. The foundation therefore expanded its work to include skills that could help young people transition towards employment.
By March 2026, the SMART programme had trained more than 250,000 young people across various trades in Indian cities. The foundation has worked both directly through its own SMART Academies and through NGO partners.
Its education initiatives also evolved over time. A major focus became teacher training, particularly through Shikshaantar, a programme that began in 2013 after the then East Delhi Municipal Corporation approached the foundation to support in-service teacher education. The initiative focuses on teachers’ continuous professional development.
Chetan believes teachers remain central to education, especially during early childhood and primary schooling.
Inclusion Must Begin at the Design Stage
Disability inclusion has been another defining part of the foundation’s work. Chetan said its founders had established an important principle in 2006 itslef: at least 10% of its beneficiaries should be persons with disabilities.
This commitment shaped programme design across education and employability.
Through ARISE+, or All-Round Improvement in Special Education, the foundation supports the education and therapy of close to 5,000 children through NGO partners. Its SMART+ programme focuses on employability training for young people with disabilities and pathways into the formal sector. Across these initiatives, the foundation has supported more than 70,000 persons with disabilities overall.
The foundation also launched The Ability Network, an initiative intended to bring organisations and solution providers together to address the diverse needs of persons with disabilities. Chetan said the platform had onboarded more than 500 solution providers.
While speaking to The Logical Indian, Chetan explained why inclusion cannot be reduced to numbers or representation.
“True inclusion is when you are integrating them all: bringing all of them together whether it is a person with disability or without, whether it’s a person of any gender, any religion, anything, getting everyone together is inclusion.”
He believes inclusion must be considered from the beginning of a programme rather than added later. Comparing it to designing an accessible building, he said accessibility needs to be part of the original planning because retrofitting can be costly or unfeasible.
He also pointed to the challenge of inadequate disability data and social stigma, arguing that greater efforts are needed to translate government policy into practice.
Preparing Young People for an AI-Driven World
As artificial intelligence began reshaping workplaces, the foundation explored how it could become part of its programmes. Chetan recalled that in August 2023, the organisation held a “Back to the Classroom” offsite to examine how AI could be integrated into its work.
By late 2023 and early 2024, introductory modules on prompt engineering had been introduced across the SMART programme. These helped young people understand how to use tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.
More advanced learning was introduced in selected programmes. In mid-2024, the foundation introduced AI for Data Analysis to prepare students for data analyst roles. Teachers in the Shikshaantar programme also began receiving support to use AI for lesson planning and classroom processes.
Chetan sees the relationship between people and technology as complementary rather than competitive. He also shared that the foundation was piloting AI-enabled glasses to explore how they could help people with visual impairments in everyday life.
Measuring Change Beyond Numbers
Reflecting on the social development sector, Kapoor acknowledged its progress, including greater public attention and increased corporate social responsibility funding. Total CSR funding in India crossed the Rs. 40,000 crore mark in 2024-25, with projections suggesting the amount could exceed ₹1 lakh crore by 2035.
However, he believes funding and scale alone do not guarantee meaningful outcomes. He highlighted duplication of efforts, uneven distribution of resources and insufficient collaboration as continuing challenges.
More importantly, he argued that organisations must look beyond the number of people reached and examine how their lives have changed.
“It is good to know that an organization has worked with 100,000 or a million people, but we really need to ask the question: How have the lives of these 100,000 or 100 million people actually changed”
For young people considering a career in the sector, Chetan places greater emphasis on personal values than technical skills. Empathy, compassion, optimism and openness to different perspectives, he believes, are essential. He also cautions against entering the field with rigid notions and beliefs before understanding the communities and challenges involved.
Looking ahead, he hopes to spend another 10 to 15 years working in social development, with technology and collaboration playing important roles in addressing complex challenges.
The Logical Indian Perspectives
Chetan Kapoor’s journey highlights how purpose can emerge through experience rather than careful planning. From helping establish a centre for children with developmental disabilities to working on education, employability and inclusive technology, his career reflects the importance of connecting individual opportunity with wider social needs.
His emphasis on designing for inclusion and measuring outcomes offers an important reminder for the development sector: reaching more people matters, but understanding whether their lives have improved matters just as much. As technology creates new possibilities, sustained collaboration and a commitment to human dignity will remain essential to making progress meaningful.
What do you think social impact organisations should prioritise: reaching more people or measuring how deeply their lives have changed? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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