When Ranjitsinh arrived at the Zilla Parishad Primary School in 2009 it was a dilapidated building, sandwiched between a cattle shed and a storeroom. Most of the girls were from tribal communities where school attendance could sometimes be as low as 2% and teenage marriage was common. For those that did make it to school, the curriculum was not in their primary language (Kannada), leaving many students unable to learn at all. Ranjitsinh was determined to turn this around, moving to the village and going to great efforts to learn the local language. Ranjitsinh then not only translated the class textbooks into his pupils’ mother tongue but also embedded them with unique QR codes to give students access to audio poems, video lectures, stories and assignments. Crucially, by analysing their reflections Ranjitsinh would change the content, activities and assignments in the QR coded textbooks to create a personalized learning experience for each student. Further to this, he upgraded the QR Coded Textbooks with immersive reader and Flipgrid tools to aid girls with special needs.

The impact of Ranjitsinh’s interventions has been extraordinary: there are now no teenage marriages in the village and 100 per cent attendance by girls at the school. The school was also recently awarded the best school in the district with 85% of his students achieving A grades in annual exams. One girl from the village has now graduated from University, something seen as an impossible dream before Ranjitsinh arrived.

Ranjitsinh then went on to create nothing short of a revolution in the use of QR coded textbooks throughout India. His school was the first in the state of Maharashtra to introduce them and after submitting a proposal and successful pilot scheme, the State Ministry announced in 2017 that they would introduce QR coded textbooks across the state for all grades 1-12. Following the success of this, HRD Ministry of India asked NCERT (National Council of Education Research and Training) to study the impact of QR Coded Textbooks and how this can be scaled up nationally. In 2018, HRD Minister Prakash Javdekar announced that all NCERT textbooks would have embedded QR Codes. Beyond the classroom, Ranjitsinh helps his students apply their learning to tackle real world problems they are facing. With his school in a drought-prone district of Maharashtra, his school has now successfully tackled the issue of desertification, increasing green land from 25% to 33% in the last ten years. In all, 250 hectares of land surrounding his village was saved from desertification, earning his school the ‘Wipro Nature for Society’ award in 2018.

Ranjitsinh is also passionate about building peace between young people across conflict zones. His ‘Let’s Cross the Borders’ project connects young people from India and Pakistan, Palestine and Israel, Iraq and Iran and USA and North Korea. Over a six-week programme, students are matched with a peace buddy from other countries with whom they closely interact - preparing presentations and listening to guest speakers together to understand their similarities. So far, Ranjitsinh has initiated an incredible 19,000 students from eight countries into this programme. Further to this, using the Microsoft Educator Community platform, Ranjitsinh spends his weekends taking students from schools around the world with depleted resources on virtual field trips.

He is most well-known for demonstrating scientific experiments from the science lab he has built in his home. Official numbers from Microsoft show that Ranjitsinh has taught an incredible 85,000 plus students from over 1400 classrooms in 83 countries via these virtual lessons. But Ranjitsinh doesn’t stop there. He is determined to ensure that everything he learns is passed on to other teachers. During summer vacations, Ranjitsinh has trained, face to face, more than 16,000 in-service teachers throughout the state of Maharashtra on how they can augment their teaching using technology. As a result of all Ranjitsinh’s endeavours, the sitting CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, recognized Ranjitsinh as one of three stories from India in his 2017 book ‘Hit Refresh’.