Ranjitsinh Disale Seeks to Improve Girls Education in India
Ranjitsinh Disale, who won the Global Teacher Prize while at a school in rural India, earns an education degree from Harvard
May 17, 2025
Later this month, on May 29, Ranjitsinh Disale will graduate with an Ed.M. degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, United States. He is likely one of the most accomplished students in his graduating class.
Since 2021, Disale, 37-years-old, has been an education advisor to the World Bank, in its efforts to accelerate student learning by improving teacher-student communications. The work includes one-to-one coaching, group training sessions and workshops, through in-person, remote or hybrid formats.
In 2020, Disale was awarded the Global Teacher Prize, from among 12,000 nominees, by the Varkey Foundation in partnership with UNESCO. The prize included an award of $1 million.
In 2009, Disale started teaching at a free, government-run Zilla Parishad Primary School for girls in a rural village in Solapur, Maharashtra, India. The students were mostly from poor, tribal communities. He set three initial goals: get parents interested in educating their children, improve student attendance, and provide quality education.
“I discovered…women in the village were more educated than men,” Disale told an interviewer, in March, for The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, at Harvard. “That realization shaped my approach. If I could win over the mothers, I could change the future of their children.”
Visiting the huts, where the students lived with their families, Disale spoke to the mothers about the value of their daughters learning math and other skills and finding better jobs than as laborers. He translated textbooks into Kannada, the mother tongue of the students. He then embedded the textbooks with QR codes to enable students to access audio poems, video lectures, stories, and assignments through mobile phones, if they had access to one at home.
In a few years, attendance at the school rose to nearly 100%, from very low levels, sometimes as low as 2%. Most students earned top grades and one girl earned a college degree, the first one to do so from among her community in the village.
In 2017, Disale’s method of using QR codes in textbooks was adopted across Maharashtra state, in all grades from 1-12. The next year, the Government of India began introducing school textbooks with embedded QR Codes.
During the 2010s, Disale organized students and parents to find water to irrigate an additional 250 hectares, increasing irrigation from a quarter to a third of the farm land in his village. On weekends, he used the Microsoft Educator Community platform to set up virtual field trips, to regions which managed their water, vegetation, and other natural resources, for students from areas around the world where resources were being depleted.
In 2018, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s work on non-violence and peace, Disale founded “Let’s Cross the Borders.” The six week program connects youth from India and Pakistan, Palestine and Israel, Iraq and Iran, and the USA and North Korea. Each student is matched with a peace buddy from another country, with whom they chat, prepare presentations, listen to guest speakers, and try to understand their similarities and overcome differences. Disale’s goal is to train 50,000 youths through the program.
Initially, Disale enrolled in an engineering college to study information technology. But, finding he did not have the aptitude to be an engineer, he followed his father’s advice and switched to a teacher's training program.
Disale earned a post-graduate diploma in Mass Communication and Journalism, 2017, and a Bachelor of Education, 2015, both from the Indira Gandhi National Open University, India. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from YCMOU, Nashik, India, 2012; and a Diploma in Education from the the Maharashtra State Exam Council, 2008.
Oddly, Disale refers to himself as Dr.Ranjitsinh on X/Twitter, though he does not appear to have a formal doctoral degree. He may have been awarded a honorary doctorate by a university, though, if true, he does not mention this on his LinkedIn profile.
In 2020, while accepting the Global Teacher Prize, Disale said that he was “very pleased to announce that I will share 50% of the ($1 million) prize money equally among my fellow Top 10 finalists to support their incredible work. I believe, together, we can change this world because sharing is growing." The other nine finalists, who received roughly $55,000 each due to Disale’s generous gesture, were teachers from Italy, Brazil, Vietnam, Malaysia, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea, the US, and the UK.
Disale added, “Teachers are the real change-makers who are changing the lives of their students with a mixture of chalk and challenges. They always believe in giving and sharing.”
Disale used his half of the prize money to upgrade his school and twenty other nearby schools: rebuild classrooms; install solar panels on rooftops to provide electricity to run computers and access the internet; and a mobile van carrying 60 computer tablets, which visits these schools once a week, providing extra lessons in Math and English.
Disale told the Mittal Institute that people expect him to be most proud of his awards, policies, or education innovations. “But for me, the answer is much simpler—it’s my students. I still remember the day Sakshi, a girl from my village, became the first person in our community to graduate. It was not just her success—it was a moment that changed the belief system of an entire village.”