Geeta Dharmarajan founded Katha in 1988. Across more than three decades she has been its main creative force — an award-winning writer for children and adults with a deep, practical curiosity about how children and communities actually learn. Before Katha she worked with the India Today Group, the University of Pennsylvania and INTACH.
Her gift is organisational design paired with what she calls pro-poor innovation: frugal, imaginative ideas that lift first-generation learners from the margins to the centre.
Returning to India in the mid-1980s, Geeta expected to find children reading and in school. In the slums of Govindpuri in Delhi, she found four-year-olds folding envelopes for a living, with little Hindi and few dreams. She has described herself as frustrated, angry and “outraged” enough to act.
As a writer, her first instinct was a story. In 1988 she started Tamasha!, a magazine for children — and named the reading elephant who became Katha's mascot. From it grew Katha Shala, the organisation's first school.
She saw quickly that a child's learning is tied to a family's survival. So Katha began training mothers in income-generating skills — if a woman could earn a little more each month, her children could stay in school. Reading, livelihoods and dignity became one joined-up mission.
That insight — connect the classroom to the community, and learning to life — still runs through everything Katha does today.
She conceptualised Katha's signature method — teaching every subject through story — in use across Katha's classrooms and partner schools.
A curriculum for life that turns children and families into “reader-leaders” who solve real problems in their own communities.
A model school in a Delhi slum that has shaped how thousands of children learn — and proved the method works.
As editor-in-chief of Katha's list, Geeta has championed Indian writing in all its languages. She instituted the Katha Awards for Literary Excellence and the Katha Prize Stories, editing work from hundreds of India's finest writers across 21 Indian languages, and curating the Katha festivals and utsavs that bring literature to the public.
Under her, Katha has published 1,050+ print and digital titles for children aged 0–17. She is herself the author of more than 30 children's books and 450+ articles and stories, and believes translation is a cohesive, counter-divisive force in India.
India's civilian honour, awarded by the Government of India for her contributions to Literature and Education.
Honoured by Business Standard for building Katha into a transformative force in Indian education.
An Ashoka Fellow, Geeta has also served as honorary Chairperson of the National Bal Bhavan — Jawaharlal Nehru's dream institution for India's children across every social and economic divide.
Geeta's belief built Katha. You can help carry it forward.