Citation An alumnus of the top-ranked NIT-Warangal, K. Tulasi Vishnu Prasad is President of the Sri Rama Rural Academy (SRRA), a model rural co-ed day-cum-boarding budget private school sited in Chilmuru village (pop.1,200) in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh. Promoted in 1949 as undivided Andhra Pradesh’s first rural boarding school by his grandfather, the late Sri Kolasani Venkata Subbaiah Chowdary, a visionary educationist committed to providing high-quality education to under-served rural children, Sri Rama Rural Academy has transformed into a progressive CBSE-affiliated K-12 school providing all-round education to 1,000 students mentored by 40 teachers. In 1986, after he was awarded a postgraduate degree in electronics and instrumentation engineering by NIT, Warangal, Prasad rejected several lucrative job offers to return to Chilmuru village and take on the challenge of nurturing SRRA into a full-fledged K-12 school providing quality education at affordable price to rural children. Since then as director and president of SRRA, Prasad has introduced several teaching-learning innovations, education management best practices and spearheaded infrastructure upgradation projects to enable provision of high-quality academics supplemented with sports and co-curricular education. In the EducationWorld India Budget Private School Rankings 2021-22, SRRA is ranked #3 in Andhra Pradesh. Prasad is also a tireless crusader and champion of budget private schools — low-fees primary-secondaries that provide affordable education, including English language learning, to children of low-income households. In 2017, he was appointed general secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Private Unaided School Managements Association (APPUSMA), which has a membership of 8,000 schools statewide. Subsequently, in 2018, he took charge as vice president (quality) of the National Independent Schools Alliance (NISA), which has over 1 lakh BPS member schools countrywide. Over the past decade, Prasad has been in the vanguard of the collective struggle of BPS promoters against the education ministry and in courts of law. “In Sri Rama Rural Academy, we have spared no effort to ensure that children from low-income rural households have access to high quality education at affordable price. Similarly, there are thousands of budget private schools across the country which are providing a valuable public service by offering affordable education options to parents fleeing failing government schools. My mission is to ensure that BPS schools are freed from government control and given full freedom and autonomy to improve, develop and upgrade into benchmark K-12 institutions producing future-ready citizens,” says Prasad, who has visited over 26 foreign countries to study international best education practices. For his sustained commitment to providing low-priced education to under-served children in rural Andhra Pradesh, and determination to improve teaching-learning standards in budget private schools, the Editors and Board of Directors of EducationWorld are proud to present the EW Extraordinary Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2021-22 to K. Tulasi Vishnu Prasad.
