About Pravin

There is one sentence Pravin Kaushal has never let go of: how to make governance efficient, economical and effective for citizens, using technology. Everything else on a long and scattered CV is a footnote to that line.

It started with a decision that was not his. He grew up in Deoghar, a small town in Jharkhand, in a joint family where education was not the priority and the family business was the expected destination. His grandfather, who believed in free will more than convention, opened a different door.

“I did not choose the path,” Pravin says. “Someone chose to give me the choice. That is a different thing entirely, and I have spent my career trying to hand that same thing to other people.”

The door led to Sainik School Tilaiya, which gave him discipline, confidence and an identity, and then to IIT Kharagpur, which took all three apart. “Five years there were a spin cycle,” he says. “I went in structured and came out reshaped. Diversity, discomfort and a few deep friendships broke a rigid worldview open, and I never wanted it back.”

His early career was inside the machinery, with the Delhi Government and the Delhi Legislative Assembly, which taught him policy, pace and public complexity. But he traces the real beginning to somewhere less official: long train rides between Kharagpur and Bihar for educational work, in crowded general coaches.

“People assume purpose arrives in a boardroom or a fellowship,” he says. “Mine arrived in a train compartment, listening to strangers talk about aspiration and anger, hope and helplessness, in the same breath. That is where I understood which kind of impact I wanted.”

Years later he bought an apartment in Sector 108, Gurugram, expecting a peaceful life in a city of glass towers and startup energy. He ran for the resident society election, believing civic leadership could be clean and collaborative.

It was not. What followed were three draining years of groupism, petty politics and personal attacks, the worst of human behaviour in the smallest possible space.

“I lost friends and found clarity,” he says. “And I learned the thing that shaped everything since. The biggest obstacle in a city like this is not governance. It is getting people to trust, to care, to collaborate despite personal differences. Software cannot fix that. But software can remove the excuses.”

That conviction became RaastaFix. It lets any citizen flag a civic problem anonymously; every report is geo-tagged, time-stamped and pushed at once to GMDA, MCG, NHAI, PWD, RWAs and local representatives, so everybody is looking at the same fact at the same time. It has reached thousands of citizens, and has been institutionalised at the state level in Haryana.

“That is the point,” he says. “Anything that depends on me to keep working has failed. The test is whether it survives your absence.”

Pravin holds filed patents across multiple products and is developing a patented bio-filter design to clean polluted air. As Co-Founder of Ecovayu Technologies he is building a portfolio of Made in India instruments: an open-path diode laser absorption spectrometer for pollution monitoring, a remote sensing device for Real Driving Emissions as required under Bharat VI and Euro VI, a handheld emission monitor that can replace PUC stations while sending NOx and PM data straight to the government, Digiplates, and green wall bio-filters powered by the pressure differential of passing traffic.

“India is the largest consumer of clean-air technology and almost none of it is ours,” he says. “That is a supply-side problem wearing a pollution costume. If our standards now match Europe's, there is no reason we cannot supply the world instead of buying from it.”

As Programme Director for the Eastern Region at WHEELS Global Foundation, the Pan-IIT alumni initiative inspired by President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam's vision for rural India, he works on technology-enabled interventions across food and agriculture, healthcare, education and livelihoods. WGF runs 50+ initiatives with 100+ partners in more than 20 states, against a single number: 180 million lives by 2030.

The work he points to is the work that outgrew its founders. A spring rejuvenation programme that restored 45 springs in 22 villages of Himachal Pradesh and became a state-led Spring Shed 2.0 covering 500 springs. An agroforestry intervention in Odisha's Rayagada–Koraput belt quadrupling incomes for marginal tribal farmers. Skilling and livelihood work with the Tharu community in West Champaran, Bihar.

“Everyone in this sector has a story,” he says. “Very few have a denominator. If you cannot tell me what the number was before you arrived, you are not doing development. You are doing publicity.”

He is Director at Verda.ai, working on AI cryptographic watermarking, and at MriKal, a data and AI centre. A MeitY-recognised startup leader, he sits on the IIRF board building an accreditation framework for AI-enabled educational institutions, and has spent the past year hosting founder and investor meet-ups in Gurugram, building a community of 350+ AI founders across Delhi NCR.

He writes columns in English and Hindi, for The Times of India, Mint, The Hindu, The Economic Times, Hindustan Times, Deccan Herald, The Wire, The Statesman, The Guardian and BW Businessworld, and for Navbharat Times, Dainik Jagran, Amar Ujala, Hindustan and Prabhat Khabar.

“The English column reaches the person who makes the policy,” he says. “The Hindi column reaches the person the policy is about. Only one of those gets forgotten.”

Gurugram remains, in his description, a city of contradictions: ambition without cohesion, diversity without unity, professional excellence that hesitates to act together. He stays anyway.

“Being an outsider gave me perspective. Building community gave me purpose,” he says. “This place never welcomed me easily. It is home because I chose to stay and shape a small part of it.”

He serves on IIT Kharagpur's Young Alumni Government Liaison Task Force and on the Executive Committee of the TAA Delhi Chapter, and is open to collaborating with governments, startups and investors building a more innovative and sustainable India.