Who is Ranjitsinh Disale, the 1st Indian to win ₹7.4 cr Global Teacher Prize?

Ranjitsinh Disale is the first Indian to win the $1-million (₹7.4 crore) Global Teacher Prize. He is a teacher from the Zilla Parishad Primary School in Maharashtra’s Paritewadi village.

Disale wanted to become an IT engineer but his father suggested teacher as a career. As reported by PTI, when he first arrived to teach at the Zilla Parishad Primary School in Paritewadi village, the building was ramshackle and sandwiched between a cattle shed and a storeroom

Disale turned the whole scene around and translated the textbooks into the local language to help children study in their mother tongue.

His interventions helped stop teenage marriages in the village and achieve 100% attendance of girls. Ranjitsinh learned Kannada to redesign the textbooks, along with QR codes that embedded audio poems and stories.

In 2017, the Maharashtra government also decided to do the same across the state for textbooks of all classes. In 2018, the HRD ministry announced that all NCERT books across India would have QR codes embedded in them.

He has decided to share half of his Rs 7.4 crore winnings with the rest of the nine finalists for the Global Teacher Prize to support the “incredible work” of the “change makers”.