← Writing / Mohit's World
The School That Started With One Question
The school in Jharkhand started with a question I could not answer satisfactorily: why, in a country that has built one of the world’s fastest-growing retail investment ecosystems, are the people I grew up around still largely absent from it?
I grew up connected to Jharkhand. My roots there go deep. India had gone from roughly 4 crore demat accounts to over 15 crore in just a few years. SIP flows were hitting record highs month after month. The primary market was booming. By every metric, India’s retail investor base was exploding.
And yet the people I knew from home, teachers, farmers, small business owners, daily wage workers, were almost entirely absent from this story. Not because they lacked capital (some had savings). Not because they lacked interest (many wanted to invest). But because no one had ever explained the basics in a language they understood, in a context that was relevant to their lives.
What the School Actually Is
The school is a small institution serving children from families that would not otherwise have access to quality education. It is not a flagship NGO project with a slick annual report and celebrity patrons. It is a working school, classrooms, teachers, curriculum, children. The kind of institution that is not glamorous but is genuinely necessary.
I help run it not because I think one school changes the world at scale, but because I believe the alternative, passively acknowledging the gap and doing nothing, is worse. There is something important about being present in a community’s development rather than just writing about it from a distance.
Over the years, the school has also become an informal laboratory for thinking about financial literacy. We have tried, at various points, to introduce age-appropriate financial concepts to older students, what savings mean, what interest is, why inflation matters, what a bank account does. The conversations have been illuminating, and often humbling. The questions children ask when they have no framework for finance are the exact same questions that trip up adults who have been investing for years but never had anyone explain the fundamentals clearly.
The Financial Literacy Gap I Have Observed
There is a particular kind of financial literacy gap in India that I think gets underappreciated. It is not about lacking information, the internet has solved the information scarcity problem. It is about lacking the conceptual foundation to make sense of information.
When someone has never encountered the concept of a real return (the difference between the nominal return on a savings account and the inflation-adjusted return), explaining it with a YouTube video is only marginally useful. The video assumes a scaffold that does not exist. You are building the third floor before the first floor is in place.
I have sat in on conversations in Jharkhand where intelligent, resourceful people, people who manage complex household economies, who navigate informal credit markets with sophistication, who make intricate land and livestock decisions, are completely stumped by a mutual fund application form. Not because they are not smart. Because the form was designed by and for people who already understand the context. It is exclusion by design, even if unintentional. India’s markets have democratised in important ways: zero brokerage, digital KYC, UPI-linked payments, the ASBA mechanism for IPOs, fractional investing in some contexts. The infrastructure has improved dramatically.
But infrastructure is necessary, not sufficient. The new demat account numbers are impressive, but I would want to know how many of those accounts are actively used, what average investment size looks like across geography, and how many account holders understand what they own and why.
My suspicion is that the democratisation story is more concentrated than the headline numbers suggest. The new investors are largely urban, educated, and already financially included in other respects. The genuinely excluded, rural communities, lower-income households, people without English literacy, are a smaller fraction of the demat account boom than the aggregate numbers imply. One of the things I have found meaningful about this work is that the mechanics of IPO participation, ASBA, UPI-based applications, simplified mobile flows, have genuinely reduced friction for first-time applicants. A farmer with a smartphone and a bank account can apply for an IPO today in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.
But what I also see is that participation without understanding is its own kind of risk. An investor who applies for an IPO because a WhatsApp group told them to, who does not understand what they are buying or how to evaluate whether the price is fair, who panics and sells at the first drop, that investor’s experience of the market may actually reduce their long-term financial wellbeing, not improve it.
Financial inclusion, done right, is not just access. It is access plus comprehension. It is having the conceptual tools to use the access productively. That is where the school and the work feel connected to me, both are, at their core, about building the scaffolding that allows people to participate in systems on their own terms.
What I Am Still Learning
Running a school in Jharkhand while working in financial services in Bengaluru involves a constant negotiation between two different worlds, one where the marginal improvement is a new trading feature or a faster payment flow, and another where the marginal improvement is getting one more child through secondary school and into a livelihood.
I do not always manage that negotiation gracefully. There are weeks when the school feels like a distraction from the work, and weeks when the work feels like a distraction from the school. But I have come to believe that holding both is important, that the people building India’s financial infrastructure need to stay in contact with the communities they are ostensibly building it for. Otherwise the gap only widens, one clever product feature at a time.
The school keeps me honest. The markets keep me funded. The combination, imperfect as it is, feels closer to the right answer than choosing one and ignoring the other.