Sayantani Gaddam

Sayantani joined the British Asian Trust in July 2025. She brings more than 30 years of social sector experience in India. She has a Master’s in Geography from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India and a Masters in Regional Planning from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India. Prior to her leading education programmes in 2019, she served as a fulltime educator at the Krishnamurti Foundation of India and certified herself as a teacher too.

Sayantani began her career working in development consulting in urban, regional and transport planning projects from which she switched very early on to join the bi/multi-lateral funded operational programmes in India and worked mainly in the Community, gender and social inclusion mainstreaming aspects of the project. With continuous professional growth in mainly Dutch and Canadian development programmes, Sayantani continued to work towards making impact visible, speaking and owning the programmes in her multi sectoral and varied geographic implementation spaces. She led as Vice President in Feedback Foundation India, a subsidiary of Feedback Infra, which developed and demonstrated Community Led Approach to Rehabilitation changing the narrative of industrial and mining related displacements in India. Thereafter Sayantani, led as Executive Director of an early stage not for profit – Ahvaan Trust, working in 50+ Delhi government schools on early childhood. In her 5-year stint, she took this to scale in 3 more states (Tripura, Chhattisgarh, Ladakh) with varied programme pathways and partnerships.

Sayantani remains committed to making impact sustainable by demonstrating inclusion, equity and agency of the community. She believes in strengthening last mile delivery and decentralised leadership with institutional development for programmes to remain relevant in the context that they were seeded. She has worked consistently to keep the government systems connected with the community for programmes and beyond.