Dr. Dhir Jhingran is the Founder and Executive Director of the Language and Learning Foundation (LLF), one of India's leading organizations working on foundational literacy and numeracy. Before founding LLF in 2015, he spent three decades in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), India's premier civil service, including senior policy roles in the Ministry of Education, before taking voluntary retirement to dedicate himself fully to education.Under his leadership, LLF has grown to roughly 300 people working inside seven-plus Indian state government systems — not running standalone pilot programs, but co-designing curriculum, teacher training, and assessment directly with governments at the scale the crisis demands. LLF's stated goal is to reach 60 million children cumulatively by 2030. Jhingran has also served as Senior Advisor to UNICEF India, advisor to Nepal's Ministry of Education, and Asia Regional Director at Room to Read, and sits on India's National Steering Committee for the development of National Curriculum Frameworks.In this episode, Dhir talks with Svenia Busson about:His path from three decades inside the IAS to founding LLF — and the moment he realized foundational learning was worth building the rest of his career aroundIndia's learning crisis in numbers — more than half of 10-year-olds cannot read a simple text with comprehension"Raising the floor" versus raising the average — why the 15-20% of children learning almost nothing in every classroom get hidden by national statisticsMother-tongue instruction and India's linguistic reality — why comprehension collapses when children are taught in a language they don't speak at homeCo-creating with government instead of building parallel programs — LLF's model for scaling reform inside state systems without taking creditWhere AI can genuinely help foundational learning, and where the hype gets ahead of the classroom reality for first-generation learnersThe non-negotiable skills named in India's National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 — critical thinking, learning to learn, and socio-emotional developmentHis advice to EdTech founders building AI tools for children aged four to ten

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