Gaurav Shah spent the early part of his career moving between roles, companies, and cities. Engineer, MBA, then stints at P&G, American Express, and Big Group. Sales, consulting, urban India, rural India, international postings.
But one question kept returning every time he thought about what came next.
“What difference am I making in whose life through the work that I’m doing?”
He never had a good answer. That gap, between the work he was doing and the work he wanted to do, is what eventually led him out of the corporate world, first to co-found the Indian School of Development Management (ISDM) and now to lead ARMMAN, a non-profit focused on improving health outcomes for pregnant women, new mothers, and their children through stronger public health systems across India.
Privilege, Courage and the Leap
Gaurav does not shy away from talking about where he comes from. “I’m an engineer MBA. I come from a fair amount of privilege in terms of the regular markers of privilege. I’m urban, I went to good English schools, I’m male, upper caste, and I come from the majority religion in the country. I represent almost all the privileges.”
Growing up, he did not fully recognise these privileges. What he did notice was his father, a chartered accountant who had spent a significant part of his life on social activism, particularly around India-Pakistan relations and the Kashmir issue. That planted a seed. But Gaurav did not know, then, that you could build a full career in the social sector.
By mid-2007, the seed had grown into something he could no longer ignore. He spent the next two years helping his father with his work while also exploring what a career outside corporate life might look like. That exploration led to his first project in 2009, with one of India’s largest microfinance institutions. He then worked with the Clinton Foundation on HIV nutrition and spent time with an impact investment fund. Slowly, it clicked.
“I always tell people that I moved into the sector for very selfish reasons. I moved into the sector for myself,” he told The Logical Indian. “This entire story of sacrifice and messiah complex, it just doesn’t work. Working in the sector is very hard. Unless you’re here for the right reasons, and the right reason really is that it should give you something, you’ll burn out very fast.”
There was also the matter of fear. “I neither had the courage nor the clarity or the conviction to really pursue that,” he says of his earlier hesitation. What finally pushed him was a simple, pointed thought: with all the privilege and the best education this country had to offer, if he had not developed the confidence to take this leap, what was any of it worth?
Learning to Unlearn
Coming from the corporate world, Gaurav arrived in the social sector with a toolkit. Strategic clarity, data, the ability to communicate complex ideas simply. These helped. But what mattered just as much was what he had to put down.
The corporate world runs on quarterly timelines. The social sector runs on decades, sometimes generations. “Change doesn’t happen like that. It’s not a factory. I’m not producing widgets.” Community work is deeply contextual. What works in one district may fail in the next.
Competition, the lifeblood of corporate strategy, had to be unlearned too. “If one genuinely wants to create change, not build organisations for vanity’s sake, then competition is not the way to be. You have to collaborate.”
The pull toward working in silos had to be unlearned as well. Social issues are interconnected, he realised, which meant stopping at symptoms was not enough. “You have to start looking at social issues from a system, interconnected systems thinking lens. You have to stop working on symptoms of issues and work on root causes.” And working on root causes meant accepting you could not do it alone.
There was also the question of values. Efficiency and standardisation, cornerstones of business management, are not enough in the social sector. “More often than not, you will look beyond just standardisation and efficiency and you have to apply principles of justice, equity, fairness, dignity.”
Why ISDM Had to Exist
One insight from his early years in the sector stayed with Gaurav and eventually became the foundation of ISDM. Both the government and the private sector had delivered change at scale, he observed, because they had combined good technical talent with good management talent. The social sector had invested in technical talent but had largely ignored management.
Worse, when the sector did look at management, it equated it entirely with business management. Gaurav believed that was wrong.
“ISDM was started on this fundamental belief that management is very important if the sector is to deliver on its promise of creating meaningful change in the lives of billions of people,” he says. “And second, really, that this sector probably needs to evolve its own domain, its own discipline and its own profession of management.”
That profession, development management, was what ISDM set out to build. After nearly ten years of that work, with a strong leadership team in place, Gaurav stepped back from the day-to-day. He remains on the board. But he wanted to build something new.
A New Chapter: ARMMAN
After a decade in what he calls the “intermediary space,” working with and for organisations rather than on the ground, Gaurav wanted to be closer to the people being served. He wanted to see, directly, whether change was happening.
ARMMAN offered that, and more. The organisation works on maternal and child health through government systems, not parallel to them, across national, state, district and municipal levels. It uses technology not as the solution but as an enabler, a distinction Gaurav is careful about.
“The mistake that we’ve made in the sector is we’ve tried to look at technology as the solution rather than as an enabler,” he says. ARMMAN’s tech-plus-touch approach, combining digital tools with human contact, matched what he believed in.
The people mattered too. Dr. Aparna Hegde, the founder, and the leadership team gave him confidence. He joined as CEO in February 2026.
What ARMMAN Does
ARMMAN’s work spans a wide spectrum. In partnership with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, it implements one of the world’s largest maternal messaging systems, reaching pregnant women and lactating mothers across 27 states and union territories through IVR-based audio and WhatsApp messages that support better health-seeking behaviour. The cumulative reach stands at around 75 million women.
In partnership with the same ministry, it also implements Mobile Academy, one of the world’s largest digital capacity-building programmes for frontline health workers, focused on the ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) cadre, across 17 states and union territories, reaching over 550,000 health workers to date.
ARMMAN also works with state governments to improve how public health systems handle high-risk pregnancies. These pregnancies, roughly 20 to 30 out of every 100, are responsible for 60 to 80 percent of maternal mortality and morbidity. The work involves embedding high-risk pregnancy protocols into government systems, training three levels of health professionals, and providing nurses with a self-paced digital training platform and an AI-based chatbot for instant, trusted clinical guidance and support. This programme is active across seven states.
In tribal geographies, where equity gaps are wider, ARMMAN trains local health workers to provide home-based diagnostics, counselling, referral and tracking services. And in both urban and rural health facilities, it supports better identification, management and tracking of high-risk pregnant women and children vulnerable to malnutrition.
The Complexity of Women’s Health in India
Just a few months in, Gaurav is careful not to claim expertise he has not yet earned. But he is already struck by the depth of the challenge.
On the demand side, women face cultural, economic and geographic barriers to accessing institutional health care. “Different communities have different cultural acceptance of institutionalized health care systems. There are many cultural norms and traditions that inhibit a woman’s ability to access institutional care during pregnancy.” Geography adds another layer. For women in remote regions, the distance to a facility is compounded by financial constraints often, resulting in the families unable to travel long distances to access quality healthcare.
On the supply side, the country’s health cadre lacks adequate training and support, hence is often overworked. ASHA workers and auxiliary nurse midwives (ANMs) face capacity and motivation challenges that no single intervention can solve overnight.
“This country is so vast and diverse. Every few hundred kilometers you have different cultures, different languages, different lives being led. And we expect the system to deliver uniform health care services to all of them.”
He is also careful about language. When the word “beneficiary” comes up in conversation, he stops. “There is an inherent power dynamic in the use of the word beneficiary. That power dynamic unfortunately also starts informing the way we do development.” He prefers terms like stakeholder, consumer, or client, because they carry a different, more respectful weight.
What He Hopes to Build
Gaurav’s goals for ARMMAN are still forming, but one stands out clearly: he wants the organisation to become a deeply reflective learning institution.
“One of the biggest differentiators among social sector organisations, in their own ability to create impact, is their ability to be deeply reflective of their own work. Ask difficult questions, ask tough questions, develop a learning orientation, continuously reflect on what’s working, what’s not working, what is needed,” he told The Logical Indian. “What happens with organisations across all spaces is we get comfortable with what we are doing. And then we stop asking these tough questions.”
The goal is not just institutional excellence for its own sake. It is to build an organisation deliberate enough and strategic enough to genuinely influence government health systems, and through those systems, to deliver equitable health outcomes for the most vulnerable women and children.
Leadership as a Verb
In over fifteen years in the development sector, Gaurav has arrived at a particular view of leadership, one that has little to do with authority and a great deal to do with listening.
“When we were younger, I would have believed that the idea of leadership was a noun. But over time, I think, I realised that the idea of leadership is not just a noun, but a verb.” It is something that can be practised by anyone, not only those with titles.
He uses the image of a locket versus a necklace. A locket model centres everything on the leader. A necklace is made of many beads, each equally important. He prefers the necklace.
“The leader doesn’t have the right answers and doesn’t need to have the right answers. But the ability to actually hear multiple voices, especially if you want to make sense of ambiguity, especially if you want to deal with conflict, hearing multiple voices and trying to bring together those multiple voices harmoniously, to take decisions which may take longer to make, but then have a much, much better chance of panning out and lasting.”
That belief in collective wisdom, in leadership as support and facilitation rather than command, may be the thread that runs most consistently through everything Gaurav Shah has built and is building still.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
At The Logical Indian, we believe that purpose-driven careers are not built in a single leap but in the quiet accumulation of honest questions, hard unlearnings, and the courage to keep choosing meaning over comfort.
Gaurav Shah’s journey from corporate boardrooms to the frontlines of maternal and child health is a reminder that the most important work often begins the moment you stop asking what you want to achieve and start asking whose life you want to change.
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