It started with one question: what does it actually take to make a teacher happy?
Years ago, in “Health is Wealth,” I wrote about something that stuck with me since school — how my teachers never seemed to take a sick day. A headache, a fever, a body ache — perfectly valid reasons to stay home — and yet they showed up, grave-faced, every single day. I used to think it was discipline.
I now think it was more of a necessity. Nobody had built them a safety net that made rest feel safe. That question sat with me through the years. And the longer I sat with it, the more I realised we’d been asking the wrong question all along.
The training exists. The teacher doesn’t.
India has started taking teacher training seriously. NEP 2020 now requires every teacher to complete 50 hours of Continuous Professional Development per year — covering classroom methods, subject knowledge, digital tools, and values. Boards like CBSE and KVS have built entire frameworks around it. On paper, this is progress. Professional development is finally a policy priority, not an afterthought. But here’s what we found once we actually sat in the room with teachers for the last 40 years!
Schools aren’t investing in teachers. They’re investing in teaching.
There’s a lesson plan, but no health plan for them. A classroom management framework, but no retirement plan. We ask teachers to master differentiated instruction while paying many of them below-average wages a month — wages that leave little room to save, let alone plan for the future. Studies on private school teachers in India have found the majority reporting high stress, and lower pay consistently comes up as one of the sharpest predictors of it.
You can’t build resilience on top of financial anxiety.
That’s not a training gap. That’s a foundational gap.
It’s Maslow’s pyramid, basically, except we’ve been asking teachers to leap straight to self-actualisation — reflective practice, 21st-century pedagogy, STEM integration — while skipping the base entirely: safety, stability, health, belonging. Professional development, as it’s currently designed, assumes the base is already there. In most Indian schools, it isn’t. So we started somewhere else.
Made possible by people who choose to stand behind us without being asked twice: Dr. Kr. Arun Singh of Sunbeam School Ballia, Nandan Kuthiala and Arati Kuthiala of Jodhamal Public School, Amit Bajla of Taurian World School, Pradip Burman and Indira Burman of Gyan Anant Vidyalaya. We thank each one of these wonderful patrons and their teams for standing by us.
Our partners, the Association of Mutual Funds in India and the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, who backed the financial and food literacy components with real institutional weight and provided their resources with open hearts.
None of this was ever about filling a bank account. It was about giving something back to the people who’ve spent their careers giving to everyone else’s children first. And slowly, city by city, we’re watching it work.
Teachers walk out with a plan for their own money, a clearer sense of what they’re eating and why it matters, and a little more comfort with the tools reshaping their classrooms. Happy teachers — or well on their way to becoming that.
Chapter 2 starts now.
If you’re a GSA school, my question to you is the same one I started with: what does it take for your teachers to be happy? Are you ready to actually invest in them — not just their lesson plans, but their lives?
There’s no cost of training. No transaction. Just a school willing to open its doors and a teacher’s staffroom that could use a little more hope in it.
We’re going into Chapter 2 of this project, and we’d love to have you on board. The question is yours now.
- Kunal Rajpurohit, Manager at the Learning Forward India Foundation, you can reach out to him at KR@LearningForward.org.in
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