Vandana Chakrabarti
Hall of Fame Class of 2024
For more than two and a half decades, Vandana Chakrabarti served as professor and director of the Department of Adult, Continuing Education and Extension Work at SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai, India. Under her leadership, the department carried out community-based courses and training programs that reached thousands of people annually, including many of the marginalized living in the city’s slums. Her crucial work for her community’s most impoverished residents is one of several facets of a career that has increased access to educational resources for all.
Among the projects Chakrabarti’s department carried out in the slums under her tenure (1993–2019) were those focused on issues such as health, immunization, HIV/AIDS, and literacy. Others projects provided training for nonliterates, neo-literates, and school dropouts. As a testament to Chakrabarti’s efforts, her department received the NLM-UNESCO Award for Excellence in Adult Continuing Education in 2002.
Chakrabarti’s greatest contribution to the field of adult education, however, came in her role as principal investigator for the ePG Pathshala project on the subject of adult education. The initiative creates open-education resources for all graduate-level courses of study (termed “postgraduate” in India) under India’s National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology. A massive undertaking, the project involved the development and production of 152 lesson modules in nine subject areas, with the lessons freely accessible online.
As PI for the project, Chakrabarti conducted a meticulous review of syllabi from all master’s programs in adult education in Indian universities and identified common topics. Subject experts on each topic from throughout India were then recruited to participate. Each expert developed content in the form of e-text, which was reviewed, and then videos were shot in studios in Delhi and Mumbai. Master’s students and professors in Indian universities regularly utilize the content, which is also available to anyone interested in learning more about adult education as a field of study.
In addition to her work on the ePG Pathshala project, Chakrabarti is a prolific author and lecturer, and has held memberships on important committees at local, state, and national levels. She helped shape India’s adult literacy policy and was instrumental in developing guidelines and standards for the operation of Adult and Continuing Education departments in Indian universities. In recognition of Chakrabarti’s stellar leadership, SNDT appointed her as pro-vice chancellor; she served in the role from 2011 to 2016.
Chakrabarti received her doctorate in social work in 1988 from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and was from 2004 to 2019, except while serving as pro-vice chancellor, also serving as head of SNDT’s Department of Social Work, where she was instrumental in initiating their master of social work program. Her multiple, simultaneous leadership responsibilities in two different but allied fields testify to her capacity for work and commitment to higher education and public service more broadly. In retirement, she serves as executive trustee of The Bombay Community Public Trust, a nonprofit that supports projects related to childhood and youth education, senior citizens care, women’s empowerment, and more.
Throughout her decades of service as director of SNDT’s adult education department, Chakrabarti demonstrated the true meaning of “extension” by ensuring that the university was always a highly visible, engaged institution in its communities, extending its intellectual, educational, and other resources in service of improving the lives of all people regardless of their circumstances. Furthermore, in making adult education resources available to all online, she has made an indelible contribution to lifelong learning and quality of life worldwide.