It was a journey of three days and three nights from Manipur to Guwahati, and the struggle was not with grief or exhaustion, but with luggage. Two cartons stuffed with shawls and mufflers, gifts pressed upon a young teacher by an entire village that had gathered to celebrate something almost no one believed was possible: a school in the remote interior of Manipur had gone from a 50-60% board results to a near-perfect 100% pass rate in a single year.
“We had a big festival in the village for the achievement,” recalls Dr. Antony Nellissery, now Head of the Sterlite EdIndia Foundation, with quiet pride. He had to redistribute most of the gifts to friends before boarding because the long road ahead simply didn’t allow him to carry so much warmth.
That moment, back in the 1990s in Manipur, set the course for everything that followed. Dr. Nellissery has since worked across classrooms, government systems, and educational institutions in many different parts of the country, driven by one conviction that has never wavered: that every child can learn, and if they are not, the fault lies with the system around them, not with the child.
A Mathematics Problem That Wasn’t About Mathematics
Long before he became an education reformer dreaming of training one lakh teachers by 2030, Dr. Nellissery was a Class 8 student struggling at mathematics. His marks were poor. His confidence was worse.
Then came Father George Arimpoor, a mathematics teacher- the kind of educator who changed his life’s trajectory. Father George looked at the young Antony and saw something that others had misread: the boy’s problem wasn’t mathematics. It was English. His father was an engineer, so the mathematical instinct was already there. But the language of instruction was a wall.
“My father was an engineer, so Father Arimpoor said my math cannot be so bad. Your environment should give you some mathematical inclination, but you’re not able to perform because of the English language.”
That act of individual attention, of a teacher truly looking at a child, became the foundational principle of Dr. Nellissery’s entire professional life. All 35-40 students from that class remember Father George to this day. They track each other’s whereabouts through him. They make it a point to visit him whenever they return home (to Kerala).
“That’s the level of connection we had with this particular Father,” he says.
From One Classroom to an Entire System
After his graduation, Dr. Nellissery was posted to Don Bosco School in Mao, Manipur, an interior school with board results hovering around 50-60%. He and the newly appointed headmaster arrived on the same day with a shared resolve; something had to change. What Dr. Nellissery was quick to point out was that the transformation was never a solo effort. A core team of four to five committed teachers worked together to drive it, with the headmaster’s full support and the freedom to experiment.
What followed was a masterclass in ground-up transformation. Dr. Nellissery didn’t wait for a better curriculum, more resources, or top-down directives. He started with remediation because, when he walked into his Class 9 and 10 classrooms on the first day, he nearly fainted. Many students couldn’t add, subtract, multiply, or divide.
“I almost fainted because many of the students didn’t know how to add and subtract. I came back to the headmaster saying, “What do I teach them?”
They rebuilt from the ground up. He introduced debates in science class, quizzes in mathematics, and reflection sessions at the end of every period. The house-and-club system, typically reserved for sports days, was repurposed entirely for learning. He used what we would today call “flipped classrooms,” a method of having students involved in teaching.
Once the students grasped the basics, Dr. Nellissery recalls, “they were flying, and we had to catch up with them as teachers.”
The result: a 100% board pass rate in Year 1 and 20% of students achieving First Division in Year 2. In the 1990s, this was the equivalent of scoring above 90% in today’s time. A village celebrated with a feast. And a young teacher made a decision that would define the next three decades. He would not stay in one school. He would go on to find every teacher he could and light the same fire.
Every Child Can Learn
That decision led Dr. Nellissery to a postgraduate programme at IRMA (Institute of Rural Management, Anand), then to Rajya Shiksha Kendra in Madhya Pradesh, and later to national-level projects with the Ministry of Human Resource Development, and eventually went on to lead Sterlite EdIndia Foundation, where he now serves as the Head, operating across Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Arunachal Pradesh, and Tripura.
Sterlite EdIndia Foundation, established in 2019, works to transform India’s public education system by strengthening it from within. Rather than working directly with schools, the Foundation partners with SCERTs, DIETs, and Teacher Education Institutions across six states, building the capacity of the institutions that train teachers, so that the impact reaches thousands of classrooms at once. Its programmes span pre-service teacher education, institutional strengthening, data analytics, and leadership development, all anchored in one principle: standardised support, but never uniform solutions.
Through every posting, state, and bureaucratic system, one conviction has remained unchanged: every child can learn, and if a child is not learning, it is not the child’s fault.
“It is the mistake of those teaching them in that environment,” he says.
He is equally unsparing of the myths that surround government schools, including the casual dismissal of government teachers as unmotivated and the assumption that private schools are inherently superior.
“Even private schools are no different. But unfortunately, a narrative as emerged that the private schooling system is good because they wear a tie and suit.” He points out that of the roughly four lakh private schools in India, perhaps one lakh can genuinely claim quality. “What happens to the remaining three lakh?”
The same logic applies in reverse. Of over a million government schools, many are excellent. The problem is not the label. It is the system, specifically whether or not the teachers within it are supported, trusted, and given the conditions to teach.
Stop Teaching Your Subject, Start Teaching Skills
One of Dr. Nellissery’s most provocative ideas, one he repeats to teachers across the country, is deceptively simple: stop teaching your subject.
Language teachers, he argues, spend so much time on the content of the language (prose, poetry, grammar) that they forget to develop the actual linguistic skill. “Please stop teaching your subject,” he tells them. “Teach linguistic skills during language class instead of making them by-heart prose and poetry.”
To history teachers who ask how critical thinking can possibly be developed in their subject, he offers this: “Even if you are teaching a poem, you can start critiquing the poet. That itself will give us a for-and-against perspective. That will also develop a more in-depth understanding.”
He draws a sharp distinction between finishing a syllabus and actually achieving learning, a distinction that runs through everything he does.
This philosophy led him to co-author The Skills Edge, a book on how life skills can be systematically embedded in school education. These include self-awareness, critical thinking, problem-solving, empathy, decision-making, interpersonal skills, and stress management. In one of his projects, a life skills programme was implemented across 1,000 schools and 70-80% showed measurable improvement, prompting the state to extend the programme from secondary to primary schools.
The Weight Teachers Carry
Dr. Nellissery speaks about the teaching profession with a particular kind of outrage, the quiet, evidence-backed kind that comes from watching something you love be chronically undervalued.
He points out that teaching is not an easy job, and that the people who say it is have never stood in a classroom for five to six hours straight. “Teachers get occupational hazards. They get problems with their legs as they spend most of their time standing.” Beyond the physical toll, most teachers get barely one free period in a day.
Then there are the non-teaching duties: election surveys, village documentation, census work, midday meal monitoring. Entire reams of apps and registers double the administrative burden without reducing any of the teaching pressure.
The pipeline supplying teachers into the system is broken at the source too. NEP 2020 flags that of the approximately 16,000 B.Ed colleges in India, over 10,000 are effectively selling certificates rather than developing actual teachers. “Just imagine,” Dr. Nellissery says, “more than 50% of the colleges are not producing or developing actual teachers.”
And the timeline is unforgiving in a way no corporate job is. “Teachers do not have that freedom,” he tells The Logical Indian. “You have to complete the syllabus in that year itself. Because Class 3 students will go to Class 4 next year. I cannot teach Class 3 syllabus in Class 4. Their timeline is sacrosanct. No negotiation.”
His vision for what teaching should be is summed up in one rallying cry he often repeats: “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, Jai Shikshak.” Farmers, soldiers, teachers: the three professions, he believes, that hold everything else up.
Building Systems That Outlast Individuals
At Sterlite EdIndia Foundation, Dr. Nellissery has turned his classroom instincts into institutional architecture. The Foundation’s Institutional Strengthening Programme works with SCERTs (State Councils of Educational Research and Training) and DIETs (District Institutes of Education and Training), the teacher-training bodies whose strength ultimately determines determines the quality of teachers these institutions produce.
“If these institutions can perform as centres of excellence, the education system can be transformed,” he says.
Critically, the programme is designed to survive transfers, India’s perennial challenge in government reform. “Individuals may move, but the systems, processes, and practices remain in place.”
He speaks with the precision of a researcher (his doctoral work examined the correlation between a school principal’s leadership style and students’ life skills development), but his real passion is unmistakable when he talks about watching a team take ownership of their work.
In one recent instance, a team member noticed that a student from a particular state had completed an online course in a single day but given it a two-out-of-five rating. Without being asked, the team called the student. The reason turned out to be a simple internet connectivity glitch. The student returned and corrected the rating.
For Dr. Nellissery, the moment illustrated exactly the culture he wants to build: one where people across the system know that someone is paying attention, not to penalise, but to understand and improve.
One Lakh Teachers by 2030
The Foundation currently operates in six states and plans to expand to nine or ten by 2029, the Foundation’s tenth anniversary. The goal: one lakh teacher graduates entering the school system by 2030.
It is, Dr. Nellissery acknowledges, ambitious. But ambition is built into his worldview.
“The problem that we have is quite high,” he says. “So we need to think in scale.”
He is equally clear-eyed about timelines. Systemic change doesn’t show up in one budget cycle. “It’s only just one and a half years of operation. The impact will start showing only after three or four years.” Most interventions, he says, need at least three to four years of sustained work before the numbers move.
But when they do, as they did in that village in Manipur where a community gathered to celebrate children who had been written off and pressed shawls and mufflers into the hands of their teachers, the impact is anything but abstract.
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Dr. Antony Nellissery is, at his core, still that young teacher who nearly fainted on his first day in Manipur, staring at Class 9 students who couldn’t multiply. What changed is the scale at which he now tries to solve that problem.
He has never stopped believing the same thing Father George showed him decades ago in a mathematics classroom: that a child’s failure is almost always a failure of the system around them, not of the child.
And like a good teacher, he has dedicated his life not just to believing it, but to proving it.
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