While Indian startup founders and developers discuss whether building smaller, fine-tuned models is reasonable for the Indian ecosystem, EkStep is quietly building on top of its philosophy to make incremental changes to ensure that users are not bombarded with change.

Sitting down with Shankar Maruwada, CEO and co-founder of EkStep, you quickly realise that this social impact organisation is a continuation of India’s largest-scale transformations—and perhaps, its most ambitious one yet.

The company follows the design philosophy of “Plus One”—a principle that prioritises building products that feel both new and natural to users.

“Plus one means it’s radical, yet practical. It opens your mind, but it still feels familiar,” Maruwada said while speaking with AIM on its What’s the Point podcast. This philosophy has guided the organisation through various product decisions, including the development of Diksha, a product that links physical textbooks with digital content through QR codes.

“Theoretically, we didn’t need QR codes. We could have built an AI app to identify textbook pages or even eliminated textbooks altogether,” he explained. “But we realised that would be too big a leap for most users.”

Instead, the team leaned on two things students already trusted and understood: textbooks and QR codes. Textbooks, in particular, remain a powerful and reliable medium for learning in India, and QR codes have just started gaining familiarity among the masses.

“The ability to scan a QR code and get digital content relevant to a specific topic gave users that ‘aha’ moment. But it came through a channel they already trusted—the textbook,” Maruwada explained.

Combining existing behaviours and tools with a slight nudge toward the future is what the Plus One philosophy stands for. It’s similar to how WhatsApp didn’t feel like a groundbreaking invention, but more like “free SMS with a better interface”. That incremental shift made adoption seamless and widespread.

“We often think of disruption as a big leap. But in reality, most successful products are just useful evolutions,” Maruwada noted. “Even ChatGPT, in a way, is just a more advanced search box or writing assistant.”

The Impact that EkStep Creates

After Aadhaar, Maruwada, along with Nandan and Rohini Nilekani, co-founded EkStep Foundation in 2015 with a vision just as grand—population-scale transformation. “Think of EkStep as a continuation of Aadhaar,” he said. “Except, that was in the government. This is philanthropy.”

The big goal was to reach 200 million children in India, improve their access to learning and help them achieve improved outcomes.

Maruwada calls it an operating philanthropy. “We don’t just give money; we operationalise missions. We pick particular problems and go after them in a mission mode. At some level, the point of EkStep is to catalyse transformation at a population scale,” said Maruwada. “Our focus is on the ‘learning to earning’ continuum.”

This continuum includes everything from early childhood education and school learning to vocational skilling and eventually, employment. But EkStep sees these as interconnected parts of a lifelong cycle. 

“In the digital world, it won’t be first you learn, then you earn. You’ll do both continuously. Everyone will have to be lifelong learners and lifelong earners,” he explained.

Building for Bharat—and for India

The foundation’s philosophy is to solve for both inclusion and innovation. “We don’t want to end up building inferior tech for inclusion,” Shankar said pointedly. “The best technology should be for those who need it the most.”

There have always been two distinct Indias within India. In the current context, we can interpret them as the urban, tech-savvy ‘India’ and the rural ‘Bharat’ with its first-time smartphone users. This divide presents unique challenges in bridging the gap between technology and its diverse users.

While speaking with AIM, Shekar Sivasubramanian, CEO of Wadhwani AI, said, “The tech that is built around the world is mostly focused on India.”. “It already assumes a certain amount of familiarity, knowledge, education, and understanding of technologies that have been used thus far.”

Delivering to this community is easy. However, the challenges become complex when it comes to delivering AI solutions or any technology to someone using a smartphone for the first time. For this population, the experience is entirely new, and as a result, there is a lack of trust, knowledge, and contextualisation of what they get in their hands – in this case, an AI chatbot.

“To deliver to a farmer, you need to know what their free time in the afternoon is and where they will use technology. You never think of that when you’re delivering in India,” Sivasubramanian said. According to him, this is also coupled with the fact that a section of the Indian population consists of people who speak thousands of dialects and languages and are not accustomed to English.

There is no better measure of the success of a technology than its acceptance by the people it aims to serve. “Keep everything else aside,” Sivasubramanian said. He added that the most important way to do this is to talk to people with empathy and vulnerability. 

“We don’t talk down to them just because we are technologists. We understand that their dignity and work are as important as ours. We sit down one-on-one with them as equals and chat, and all the truths and problems come out.”

This vision manifests in EkStep’s open digital public infrastructure (DPI)—platforms that others can build upon. It’s an ethos similar to what powered Aadhaar, UPI, and other public digital goods that have transformed the Indian economy.

But Maruwada is quick to point out that large-scale change in a diverse country like India doesn’t happen in silos. “As Rohini likes to say, India needs all three pillars of society to come together—sarkar (government), bazaar (market), and samaj (society).” 

EkStep sees itself as a representative of the samaj—a civil society actor building digital public goods for the broader ecosystem.

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