Ridhi Aggarwal

Ridhi Aggarwal is the co-founder of Swatantra Talim, a non-profit working in the field of alternative education in the interior villages of Uttar Pradesh, India since July 2013. The organization’s vision is to co-create every village as a ”centre of innovation” and every child as an “innovator” facilitating social change. The students are in the age group of 6 to 18 years with whom efforts are made to nurture their socio-scientific temper through hands-on curriculum and contextual pedagogy.  

Aggarwal’s focus points in the organization is towards strategy, curriculum, and building competencies of grass-root teachers through capacity building workshops. Before Swatantra Talim, she worked in corporates, NGOs, and schools like Times of India, Edelweiss Capital, Nalanda (Lucknow), and Sahyadri School (Krishnamurthi Foundation India).  

A graduate from Lady Shri Ram College (Delhi University), Aggarwal is a post-graduate in education and commerce from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and Delhi School of Economics. She has been a Wipro Seeding Fellow since 2017 and a FabLearn Fellow 2020-22 from Columbia University, USA.   

Aggarwal is also an avid storyteller and an origami lover. She has been instrumental in co-creating maker-spaces in public, private schools and non-formal learning centers. She has presented a paper in FabLearn, Italy on “Culturally responsive maker-space learning model towards meaningful education for marginalized communities”. She has initiated a children’s newspaper — Baal-Kranti (the revolutionary voices of children) in the year 2021.