Eight years after leaving a classroom in Hyderabad as a Teach For India Fellow, Zaid Ahsan Siddiqui received a phone call that stayed with him. A former student had scored 95% in her Class XII board exams, and her mother—whom he had last spoken to nearly a decade ago—still fondly remembered him. For Zaid, that phone call was not just a moment of joy. It was proof that the path he had chosen, one built on uncertainty, empathy and a stubborn belief in long-term impact, had been the right one.
Zaid, a Delhi-born social sector professional, has spent close to a decade working across primary education, early childhood development, rural development, and inclusive livelihood. His work spans community-based initiatives, government systems, and corporate programmes across India. He currently works with Eternal’s sustainability team, supporting Zomato’s inclusive livelihood efforts by enabling persons with disabilities to work as delivery partners.
From Commerce to Classrooms: A Career Built on Curiosity, Not a Plan
Zaid’s entry into the social sector was not a calculated move. It was, by his own admission, driven more by instinct than by design. During graduation, he pursued b.com Honours from Delhi University. “All of that happened by default for me,” he told The Logical Indian. “Let’s do this course because people around me are doing this.”
But as his bachelor’s years came to a close, something shifted. He began asking harder questions. “What should I really do to add meaning to myself and the world around me?”, he reflected. This allowed him to understand himself and his inclination towards social impact. However, he also held a bias that social impact is largely charity based, and is not focused at sustained impact. Rather than dismiss the pull over a bias, he decided to test it. He gave himself two years to explore, leading him to the Teach for India fellowship.
Stepping into Hyderabad: A Classroom That Changed Everything
In Hyderabad, Zaid taught Grades 3 and 4 at Diamond Mission High School, a low-income private school. In a classroom of 30 students, learning levels varied widely, from fluent readers to those struggling with basic letter recognition. He quickly saw the gap between what the system expected and what students needed. “I went in thinking attaining student learning outcomes wouldn’t be that difficult,” he says. “But it was.”
His early months were a mix of high energy and honest failure. But instead of retreating to the syllabus, he went further. He started walking through the community, visiting students’ homes, talking to parents. He discovered that many families were first-generation learners, often striving to make ends meet while ensuring their children’s education. They had the desire for their children to be educated. What they lacked was the knowledge how their involvement mattered beyond just sending children to school and paying their fees.
Zaid began home visits at a time when it was not standard practice for teachers in that school or that community. Parents were curious, sometimes puzzled, but largely welcoming. The visits built something that no curriculum could: trust.
The Student Who Didn’t Speak
Among Zaid’s students was a boy who barely communicated and struggled with foundational literacy and numeracy. As student learning outcomes would suggest, he sat at the wrong end of any learning spectrum in the classroom.
Zaid made a deliberate choice to not burden him with curricular goals that were unrealistic. Instead, he focused on building a relationship, creating a space where the student felt free rather than judged. Teach for India encouraged informal bonds between students and teachers, and Zaid leaned into that.
By the end of two years, the boy who had not spoken was smiling. He was making friends and gently pranking them. His parents reported that he had become more expressive at home too.
“Curriculum wise he climbed a bit,” Zaid told The Logical Indian. “But in terms of confidence and the ability to exhibit learning was where the real growth was.” This was built at the back of positive relationships with both the student and his parents.
It was an impact that would never appear in any learning outcome dashboard. But it stayed with Zaid.
Learning the Theory After Living the Practice
Throughout his first year, Zaid was working largely on instinct and hit & trial. His tools were empathy, curiosity and peer learning. He realized that achieving social impact outcomes required sound diagnosis of the context, thoughtful design thinking, and execution that plays out in daily social realities amongst various stakeholders.
He pursued Masters in Social Work from Jamia Millia Islamia to build this foundation clearly and strongly. The course combined theoretical frameworks with constant upskilling and over 800 hours of fieldwork.
From micro to macro enabling impact at scale across India
After his Social Work education, Zaid chose to work in different parts of the impact space. This helped him explore mechanisms of large-scale programme deliveries while continuing to build an understanding of the most pressing social problems in India.
He delved into rural development with PRADAN, working in remote villages in Jharkhand. He spent three months residing in a tribal village as part of training. There, he farmed their land with them, sat in early morning Gram Sabhas, visited health centers and Anganwadi centers, while interacting with the elderly, the children, the men, and the women. This rooted him into the village realities and their needs. He proceeded to work with them through women’s self-help groups and community institutions—covering livelihoods, institution building, access to welfare schemes, and grassroots ownership.
He then moved to Meraki Foundation, working with the Department of Women Empowerment and Child Development, Uttarakhand, on early childhood care and education across 20,000+Anganwadi centres. Here, he worked closely with frontline Anganwadi workers, supporting capacity building, strengthening ICDS service delivery, and improving monitoring mechanisms.
This was his first deep exposure to working at scale within government. He saw that outcomes depended not just on programme design, but on frontline capacity, administrative coordination, and consistent follow-through.
He carried this learning into Madhya Pradesh, where he led district wide foundational literacy and numeracy programmes as a NIPUN Professional with the Tata Institute of Social Sciences-Center of Excellence in Teacher Education, under NIPUN Bharat mission. Working with district administrations in Mandla and Datia districts, he engaged with teachers and officials to strengthen program implementation and build ownership within the system.
Over time, his understanding of impact began to shift—from designing programmes to making them work within complex systems. He saw that scale is not just about reach, but about consistency—ensuring that thousands of frontline workers deliver effectively across different contexts.
“When something works at scale, it’s usually because the people delivering it have made it their own,” he says.
He also began to recognise how systems signal their priorities. For instance, the absence of senior leadership in district reviews often indicated a lack of urgency—shaping how seriously programmes were implemented on the ground.
For Zaid, these signals became as important as the programme itself. Sustained impact, he realised, depends on understanding how systems behave—and working within that reality to build ownership over time.
From Classrooms to Gig Economy: Building Inclusive Livelihoods
Today, Zaid works with Eternal’s sustainability team on Zomato’s inclusive livelihood programme, enabling persons with disability (PwDs) to work as delivery partners.
So far, 3,000+ persons with disabilities have been onboarded across India, earning livelihood and supporting their families—challenging assumptions about who can participate in public-facing work.
The programme focuses on making the delivery partner role more inclusive and accessible for persons with disability. It does so through a variation of efforts from product changes to on-ground sensitization of stakeholders of restaurants and customers, amongst other measures. Any iterations in this direction are initiated by a mix of on-ground feedback and business functionality. As ideas begin to take shape, they are pilot-tested with clear objectives to check for efficacy in real-time and identify any breaks. Once proven effective, the efforts are scaled to support all persons with disability delivery partners.
“Making the delivery partner role accessible for persons with disabilities requires persistent effort rather than a one time approach”, he says.
The Challenge No Feature Can Fully Solve
While some challenges can be addressed through design and iteration, others sit outside organisational control. Internal teams and delivery partners can be sensitised through structured effort, but influencing customer behaviour or high-pressure restaurant environments is far more complex.
“These aren’t circumstances where you can transform quickly with a product feature,” Zaid says. “They require time and repeated exposure.”
He observes that hesitation in such moments, such as between customers and persons with disability delivery partners, is often less about resistance and more about unfamiliarity. Over time, consistent visibility of persons with disabilities in everyday roles helps shift that familiarity into comfort.
“Inclusion is not just about access,” he says. “It’s about normalising presence in everyday spaces.”
The Patience That Social Impact Requires
Zaid does not romanticise the sector, and is thoughtful about the limitations of working towards social impact. While a livelihood intervention begins to transform the life of an adult today, it does not necessarily fix the educational disadvantage their child might face tomorrow. After nearly a decade in the sector, Zaid sees true impact as something that builds slowly—and often becomes visible much later.
The phone call from his former student in Hyderabad—who scored 95% and whose mother still remembered him—was eight years in the making. The children he worked with in early childhood programmes in Uttarakhand are only now reaching stages where learning outcomes become more visible to both parents and the system. His efforts to strengthen ICDS delivery through Anganwadi centres focused on building this foundation. For Zaid, that isn’t a long time; it’s simply how change unfolds. “Maybe in another eight years, a person with disability delivery partner will call to share the impact of Zomato’s inclusive livelihood efforts,” he says.
“Impact is not what you see immediately,” he says. “It’s what continues to hold, years after you’ve stepped away.”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
India’s social sector runs on people who show up without guarantees, stay without applause, and measure success in years, not months. Zaid Ahsan Siddiqui is one of them.
From a Hyderabad classroom to Anganwadis in Uttarakhand to disability inclusion at Eternal, his journey shows that meaningful work is rarely loud, but it is always necessary. Do you think India does enough to support and recognise the people working at the grassroots of social change?
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