Mumbai's Madhav Chavan wins 2012 'Nobel Prize' in education

Mumbai based Madhav Chavan who has been educating slum children in Mumbai for over twenty years, has been awarded the 2012 WISE Prize, widely considered to be the Nobel prize in education. Chavan started his mission to educate the underprivileged slum children of  Mumbai in the late 1980s after he came back from the US, the BBC reported. On Tuesday his efforts in developing an innovative system for providing lessons for large numbers of people at low cost, culminated in him getting the 2012 WISE Prize. [caption id=“attachment_523860” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Madhav Chavan. Pic courtesy IBNLive.[/caption] The WISE Prize is popularly considered to be the Nobel Prize in education and was announced at a summit in Qatar. “Much more remains to be done,” said Dr Chavan, when he received the prize. The international award, which comes with a prize of $500,000 (£314,000), recognises Dr Chavan’s efforts to provide lessons in literacy and numeracy for disadvantaged children and adults in India. The award is decided by an international jury, including the US Librarian of Congress, Dr James Billington; the president of Peking University, Prof Zhou Qifeng; former UN high commissioner, Mary Robinson and the chairman of WISE, Dr Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani. Read the full story here.