ABOUT US

Ajay Sinha

Mr. Ajay Sinha is a Social Work professional with more than 20 years of experience in the area of Technology & Development, Human Rights and Social and Economic Policy and Development.

He has engaged extensively with civil society organisations ranging from grassroots NGOs, community based organisations, women and children federations, local traders’ associations and local artisans’ associations to district, state and central government administration to inform programme and policy on the basis of ground realities.

He has publications on policy analysis and budget analysis and understands the budgeting and planning systems and processes in India at the Union and State levels. He is an expert on Child Online Safety and WelI-Being and has deep understanding of Digital Society.

Dr Raj Bhandari

Dr Raj Bhandari is the Chief Mentor and a Founding Member of FLAIR. He is a senior Paediatrician, trained at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. His twin experience as a clinical pediatrician and a project management expert makes him a formidable choice for advocacy, design and influence policies and programmes. In his professional tenure of more than four decades, he has worked across multiple streams and organisations to emerge as a thought and action leader in cross sectional fields. He has served as a consultant and advisor to the leading world organisations like the World Bank, UNICEF, UNFPA, WHO, DFID (UK), and Maharashtra Village Social Transformation Foundation (Public Private Partnership). He has also served on various National and State level Technical Committees and Boards of the Union and State Governments. His special focus has been children, adolescents and young people. He works extensively with the school and university systems in India.

He is now dedicating his professional expertise and action for building partnerships and deriving insights from global best practices, to bridge the gaps and bring all stake holders together for the betterment of society.

Dr. Sanjeev Rai

Dr. Sanjeev Rai, is an expert on education in conflict, teachers’ development and developmental issues concerning children. Currently he is working as an Adjunct Professor, with Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India and Adjunct Faculty, Ambedkar University, Delhi.

Dr. Rai is the co-chair of global alliance on Post Conflict and Peace Education. He has worked earlier with Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, Kabul, Education Above All Foundation, Qatar and with Save the Children, UNICEF, CARE and Aga Khan Foundation in India. He has worked with media houses as well.

Dr. Sanjeev writes for leading publications in English and Hindi as well as authored many papers and reports.

Yogesh Kumar

Mr. Yogesh Kumar is the State Convenor of national networks - Campaign Against Child Labour and Campaign Against Child Trafficking, meant for the welfare of women and children. Currently he is also the Director of AFD-Pratidhi.

He has worked extensively on issues of women and children, including sexual assault (adult and children both), domestic violence, child labour, child trafficking etc. He has developed various training and education materials and undertraining capacity building programmes on gender and child protection issues, particularly sexual assault, juvenile justice, sexual harassment at workplace, for police officials, members/chairpersons of child welfare committees, representatives of civil society organisations, and children. Being trained as a social worker, he has also provided psycho-social counseling to women and children who have been sexually abused.

Dr. Yatan Pal Singh Balhara

Dr. Balhara is an Additional Professor of Psychiatry at the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre (NDDTC), in the Department of Psychiatry of the All India Institute of Medicine (AIIMS) in New Delhi. He also heads Behavioural Addictions Clinic at AIIMS, New Delhi. Dr. Balhara received his MD in Psychiatry from AIIMS, New Delhi, in 2006. He has also held a Diplomate of National Board DNB (Psychiatry) from the National Board of Education since 2007. He was awarded the Dr. Vidya Sagar Gold Medal for his performance during his MD training.

Dr. Balhara then completed the International Masters of Mental Health Policy and Services program offered by the World Health Organization (WHO) in collaboration with the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, for which he secured a WHO study scholarship. Currently, he is involved in clinical service delivery in both inpatient and outpatient settings. In addition, he runs a weekly clinic on dual diagnosis, which deals with comorbid substance use disorders and psychotic disorders. Moreover, Dr. Balhara is engaged in the teaching and training of undergraduate and postgraduate medical students and nursing students. His interests are in psychiatry and substance use disorders, and his research has dealt with dual diagnosis (co-morbid substance use disorders and psychotic disorders), substance use disorders, and psychiatry training. Dr. Balhara has been involved in multi-national research projects, including a project conducted with the World Psychiatry Association (WPA).

As a GMH Scholar, Dr. Balhara participated in the planning and designing of ICD-11 field studies on mood disorders. Additionally, he has pursued research on behavioral addictions that has focused on various aspects of these disorders.

Prof. Vandana Saxena

Prof. vandana is an eminent educationist with a demonstrated profile of research in education. She has cultivated the idea of Diversity Pedagogy. With a master's in Physics she has contributed significantly to the field of science education. She has been diligently promoting the case of equal opportunities for all. Even while spelling her name, she believes that all the alphabets are equally significant and the thought is more important than the person, so a conscious use of lowercasing for the name.

In her academic persuasion to cultivate democratic educational environment in schools, she has engaged in rigorous research and has developed research based thought provoking pedagogical designs addressing issues of Diversity and Democracy in a regular school system. She is working with Central Institute of Education (CIE), Department of Education, University of Delhi, India since November 1997 and has taught in a school for four years prior to that. She has had the opportunity to work with many national and international organizations like World Bank, MHRD India, NCERT, NIEPA, NIOS, NCTE, SCERT, RCI, Roehampton University, London, USIEF, and UGC. On the way, she has worked with a national team to develop E-Modules for master trainers for inclusive education in association with World Bank and MHRD India.

Vikram Srivastava

Vikram Srivastava is a human rights lawyer based in Delhi NCR and widely travelled. He is the founder of Independent Thought (www.ithought.in) a National Human Rights organization working towards equity, justice and mutual respect, with focus on child rights law.

Vikram has over two decades of experience on human rights and strategic litigation. Vikram anchors #MISSION2029 as part of Campaign against Child Marriage (CACM) – www.childmarriage.info. Independent Thought has been instrumental in the historic judgment by Supreme Court of India criminalizing sex with minor wife.

Pradeep Narayanan

Pradeep Narayanan is a rights-based researcher focusing on community mobilisation, child rights, and business and human rights. Over the years, he has designed participatory monitoring frameworks on the issue of community participation and been involved with related capacity building efforts.

He is currently with Praxis as the director of programme and capacity building. He is also director of Partners in Change and serves on the Advisory Board of the Community Development Journal. He has authored several articles and co-edited the publication Participation Pays. He is Honorary and Visiting Fellow, Sociology, Durham University

Vinay Krishna

Vinay is a Change Agent, Software Craftsman, Programmer, Consultant and Trainer. He has 16 years of rigorous work experience on software product development. Past 9 years he has been practicing Scrum, XP, Lean, Agile, TDD, BDD, Refactoring, Clean Code, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, DevOps.

He is doing research in the field of Software architecture. So far his 10+ papers have been published in various international journals and conference proceedings. His two papers are translated in Chinese language by scrum network at China. Vinay is also managing Agile Bangalore user group. He served as a Secretary and Management Committee member of Computer Society of India (CSI), Bangalore Chapter. He has been part of organizing team of several international conferences. He is Volunteer speaker at CSI and gives tech talk/guest lectures in Agile, XP, Scrum, Lean, OOAD and Software Architecture at prestigious engineering colleges/universities and different organizations.

In leisure time, love to develop mobile applications to help society, so far developed 7+ very successful mobile apps in healthcare, news and entertainment category which are widely in use. Few of them are voice based.

Specialties: IoT, Continuous Delivery, Devops, Docker, Puppet/Chef, Jenkins, TeamCity, DDD, TDD, BDD, Clean code, Refactoring, Continuous Integration, Architecture & Design, UML, Design Patterns, Project and Team management, Agile Methods, Scrum, XP, Lean, .Net, Java, Python, Node.js, MS SQL Server, Oracle, JIRA, TargetProcess, TFS, nUnit, SpecFlow, nSubstitute, RhinoMock, Mockito, Arduino