Outstanding Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2017 Dr. Deepak & Dr. Bharti Madhok Citation Dr. Deepak & Dr. Bharti Madhok are the co-founders of the Sunbeam Group of Educational Institutions (SGEI) comprising 13 institutions in Varanasi including six co-ed schools with 14,991 students, two women’s colleges and the Gramin School, Karsana, a free school offering vocational training to 800 students. They have also promoted 16 associate Sunbeam schools in Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous state (212 million). The seeds of the Sunbeam Group were planted four decades ago by Dr. Amrit Lal Madhok and Deesh ‘Ishrat’ Madhok who promoted the first Sunbeam School in the Bhagwanpur area of the holy city of Varanasi. An alumnus of Benaras Hindu and Allahabad universities and former civic administrator of the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission, Deepak quit the civil service in 1990 to help his parents realise their mission of providing high-quality, English medium education to the underserved children of Uttar Pradesh. Since then together with wife, Bharti, an English literature postgraduate of Kurukshetra University, and former Haryana cricket star, he has helped transform SGEI into Uttar Pradesh’s fastest growing schools chain. The group’s flagship Sunbeam School, Lahartara has been consistently ranked among the state’s Top 3 primary-secondaries in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings. In addition, over the past eight years under the aegis of Sunbeam Eduserve, they have promoted Sunbeam schools under the franchise model in tier-II and tier-III urban habitats of eastern Uttar Pradesh. These schools provide English-medium education to children in the neglected small towns of UP. More recently in 2013, under the leadership of Bharti, a Sunbeam Autism Centre was inaugurated in Varanasi. In India’s most populous state where education is severely neglected — and English-medium education even more so — Dr. Deepak and Dr. Bharti Madhok have promoted 16 high-quality K-12 franchise schools with an aggregate enrolment of 11,504 children in tier-I and tier-II towns — including Jaunpur, Ghazipur and Mau — in the most educationally and economically backward regions of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Therefore, for their extraordinary contribution and commitment to providing quality K-12 education and upgrading education standards in the most under-developed regions of Uttar Pradesh, the Board of Directors and Editors of EducationWorld are proud to present Dr. Deepak & Dr. Bharti Madhok the EW Outstanding Achievement in Education Leadership Award 2017 and induct them into the EW Hall of Fame of Indian Education.
