Shankar Maruwada is a social entrepreneur and CEO of the EkStep Foundation, which he co-founded with Nandan Nilekani and Rohini Nilekani in 2015. His work focuses on how to catalyze equitable, people-centered transformation at a scale that can impact billions of lives.
Featured in MIT Sloan Management Review India’s ‘Policy 50’, a definitive list of the 50 leaders who are steering and shaping India’s digital economy, Shankar has three decades of experience across corporate, entrepreneurial, government, and development sectors. This allows him to bring the best of thinking from different perspectives to shape EkStep’s strategic choices for achieving population-scale impact.
Shankar is passionate about a ‘People Plus’ approach to innovations that leverage technology for large-scale societal transformation and keep the citizen at the center. A passion and a commitment that is reflected in all the work and programs run and orchestrated by the Foundation. EkStep works at the intersection of cutting-edge techno-social ideas like digital public infrastructure, open digital networks, and artificial intelligence, creating solutions in collaboration with governments, for-profits, non-profits, academia, and other philanthropies.
Shankar was part of the founding team of Aadhaar (India’s Digital Identity program reaching 1.4 billion individuals) in 2009. In fact, he was responsible for naming it as the Head of Demand Generation and Communication.
He serves/has served on multiple government committees and advisory bodies on digital transformation, across education, capacity building, urban transformation, agriculture, digital public infrastructure, and artificial intelligence.
He is also the Co-Chair of the Centre of Open Societal Systems (COSS) at IIITB, serves on the board for the Centre for Exponential Change, and serves on advisory boards for India Leadership for Social Sector (ILSS) and Udhyam Learning Foundation.
Shankar is also a successful entrepreneur who co-founded one of India’s first data analytics startups, Marketics. His entrepreneurial story is chronicled in Rashmi Bansal’s 2008 bestseller ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’. He currently mentors startups, social entrepreneurs, and not-for-profits.
He is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, whose motto, ‘Dedicated to the service of the nation’, is a lifelong endeavor for him. Shankar is also an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
