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Bengaluru | 6 February 2026 ā Shikshagraha, a people-powered education movement working to strengthen leadership across Indiaās public education ecosystem, today announced the winners of the Shikshagraha Awards 2026, honouring three grassroots education leaders whose work has driven measurable, community-led change in government schools and local learning spaces. The awards were presented at InvokED 5.0, a two-day global dialogue on education leadership, organised by Shikshagraha, ShikshaLokam, and Mantra4Change, and held on 6ā7 February 2026 at the Prestige Centre for Performing Arts (PCPA), Bengaluru.
Mrs. Kumari Shibulal, founder-chairperson of the Shibulal Family Philanthropic Initiatives (SFPI), and Mr. Shibulal, lighting the ceremonial lamp at the opening of @InvokED2026.
Instituted by The Shibulal Family Philanthropic Initiatives (SFPI), the Shikshagraha Awards recognise leaders working both within and beyond formal education systems who are addressing systemic challenges from the ground up. Each award includes a monetary grant disbursed over two years, a trophy and certificate of excellence, structured mentorship, national visibility across Shikshagraha platforms, and opportunities to engage with policymakers, funders and peer networks. The awards are designed not only to recognise excellence, but to help practitioner-led solutions travel further and influence system-level change.
SD Shibulal, Co-founder of SFPI and Co-founder and Former CEO, Infosys, said, "The Shikshagraha Awards do more than recognise individual excellence; they invest in it. By combining recognition with mentorship and sustained support, we aim to build a pipeline of leaders whose ideas and evidence can reshape education systems for millions of children."
Shikshagraha also announced a strategic partnership with the Childaid Network Foundation, a trust-based philanthropic network that has worked across Indiaās North East since 2006. Childaidās two decades of local experience through its partners, working with 1,600 government schools and reaching roughly 200,000 children, will be combined with Shikshagrahaās national convening power to mobilise partners, resources and government relationships toward an ambitious shared goal of scaling impact to two million children.
Martin Kasper, Founder & President, Childaid Network Foundation, said, "Partnering with Shikshagraha is a strategic inflection point for Childaid Network Foundation. We hope that together we can leverage the advanced education networks and policy advocacy to help translate our twenty years of local learning in North East India into scale, mobilising partners, resources and government engagement to reach two million children."
The Shikshagraha Awards were a central highlight of InvokED 2026, a global dialogue on education leadership that convenes policymakers, practitioners, international partners, philanthropists and young leaders to exchange evidence, surface practice-led solutions, and catalyse collective action towards education equity.
Diversity editor Ram Kamal and Prateek Khandelwal Founder, Ramp My City at the InvokEd 2026.
The convening is designed to bridge the gap between system-level thinking and classroom realities through a mix of plenaries, fireside conversations, curated ābraindatesā, dialogue corners, and hands-on practice showcases.
Key sessions and themes at InvokED 2026 included:
InvokEDās format intentionally blends storytelling with evidence, pairing short, practice-rich showcases with closed-door roundtables where state officials and frontline educators explore pathways to scale. This approach helps surface implementable insights while building the relationships required to translate ideas into policy action and funding priorities.
InvokED 2026 brought together senior leaders from government, philanthropy and global education networks, including officials from the Department of School Education & Literacy and the Department of Higher Education, international education practitioners, and members of the Shibulal Family Philanthropic Initiatives.
ShikshaLokam is an NGO founded under the aegis of The Shibulal Family Philanthropic Initiatives. The organisation works to restore the agency of education leaders in the K-12 public education ecosystem. By doing so, leadersā ability to continuously improve is enhanced, they are able to solve the school improvement challenges on their own, and the vision of all our children getting access to quality education as a fundamental right, will be realised.
As an education leadership catalyst, the organisation co-creates education leadership missions, and builds open-source digital capabilities to enable leaders, along with the government and civil society. ShikshaLokam is a co-builder of the Shikshagraha peopleās movement, which aims to bring the government, the CSO, and the community together to improve all 1 million public schools in India. Every year, the organisation spotlights education leadership at InvokED ā a global dialogue, and through the Shikshagraha Awards which honour exceptional leaders in education.
Today, in eight plus years, ShikshaLokam has co-created continuous learning and improvement programs and solutions, impacting more than 450,000 lakhs leaders across 27 States & UTs, with 19L+ micro-improvements triggered by education leaders to enable enriching learning experiences for children.
In Jan 2023, ShikshaLokam received The Collective Social Innovation Award 2023 by The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, a sister organisation of World Economic Forum, for catalysing collective action to enable systemic education transformation in the Punjab state.
Learn more at https://shikshalokam.org/
Awardee Nellori Subrahmanyam (Andhra Pradesh) demonstrating his public science program to visitors of InvokEd 2026.