Wikipedia
Pratham is one of the largest non-governmental organisations in India. It was co-founded by Madhav Chavan and Farida Lambay . It works towards the provision of quality education to the underprivileged children in India. Established in Mumbai in 1994 to provide pre-school education to children in slums, Pratham today has interventions spread across 23 states and union territories of India and has supporting chapters in the United States, UK, Germany and UAE.
Pratham’s founder and Ex-CEO, Madhav Chavan, was the 2011 recipient of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. In addition, Pratham received the 2013 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Development Cooperation, as a result of successfully catering to the learning needs of tens of millions of disadvantaged children for over twenty years. In doing so, it has designed and implemented new methods that accelerate reading acquisition, using a grassroots approach in which pupils are grouped by actual levels and needs instead of age, while providing specific training to the teachers and volunteers recruited to its programs.
Pratham is an Indian ionospheric research satellite which will be operated by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay as part of the Student Satellite Initiative. Its primary mission is to count electrons in the Earth's ionosphere.
The Pratham spacecraft is a cube with sides, and a mass of around . It was conceptualized by a team of students under the supervision of Professor K. Sudhakar. The satellite is currently under construction, and pre-launch testing is expected to begin in July 2010. will be launched into low Earth orbit (LEO) by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as a secondary payload aboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) flying from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre.