Why Our Mentor Built GiftedKids.in — India's First Gifted Education Platform

You know our mentor, Kunwer Sachdev — the Solar Man of India — as the engineer who built Su-Kam from a one-room workshop into a ₹1,200-crore power company with 100+ patents and products in 90+ countries. What almost no one knew, including him, is that he spent forty-seven years as an unidentified gifted child. That discovery is why he has now co-founded GiftedKids.in, India's first platform dedicated to identifying and nurturing gifted children.

A government-school boy who failed Physics

He was a government school student in Punjabi Bagh, Delhi. He failed Physics. He repeated his 12th standard. Not one teacher ever said, "this boy thinks differently." He carried that quiet confusion for decades — through building a business, through seeing patterns in numbers others missed, through an internal critic that never let him rest. At 47, he read a book called Gifted Grownups and, for the first time in his life, felt seen. The traits he had always treated as quirks were the signature of a brain wired differently. He had been a gifted grown-up his whole life, and nobody had ever had a word for it.

The same instinct that built solar systems

For thirty years his work was about capacity that stays invisible until you build the right system around it. A solar panel and a battery hold enormous energy — but without the right inverter, charge controller and design, that energy sits there untapped, and everyone assumes the source is weak. A gifted child is exactly that. The potential is there, but without identification and the right challenge it is not just wasted — it is often punished. The boy in the third row, bored and marked as a behaviour problem, was him. After a career releasing hidden energy in machines, he wants to spend this chapter releasing it in children.

What GiftedKids.in is building

India has roughly one crore gifted children in its classrooms right now, and almost none have been identified. Western IQ tests were built for English-speaking, Western children — they cannot see the gifted child who thinks in Bhojpuri, studies in a Hindi-medium school, and shows genius through mechanical curiosity. So GiftedKids.in is building India's first observational identification framework — based on how a child engages with the world, not a test score — alongside an advocacy toolkit for parents and a searchable map of scholarships and programmes. He is building it with co-founders Khushboo Sachdev, CEO of Su-vastika and a Government of India patent holder, and Dr. Inderbir Kaur Sandhu, who holds a PhD in gifted education from the University of Cambridge.