Board of Trustees
Dr. Shankara Prasad
Founder and Managing Trustee
Dr. Shankara Prasad has an M. Tech degree from IIT, Kanpur and Ph.D. in Engineering from State University of New York, Stony Brook.
Dr. Prasad has worked in the Computer industry for more than 20 years with Intel, Bosch, CS2 in USA & Europe and has been a technology consultant for Semiconductor companies in 17 countries. Since 2001, Dr. Prasad is an active e-governance evangelist and his passion is to bring Six Sigma Enterprise philosophy and methodology into the Indian Government domain. He is the architect of a Work Flow Automation software solution for Gram Panchayats, which is specifically developed to make Local Governments digitally enabled. Presently, Dr. Prasad is the Founder and Managing Trustee of Sampoorna Swaraj Foundation, which focuses on implementing ICT solutions (Sampoorna Panchayat Work Flow Automation and Navigated Learning Technology solution) at Gram Panchayats to enable capacity building, participatory democracy and facilitate accountable and transparent local self governments.
Gopal S. Krishna
Gopal has professional experience in the electronics and semiconductor Industry. He lead various teams and organisations for Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in the United States. Most recently he was the Managing Director of Maxim Integrated Products, India. Gopal’s interests are preventive healthcare/wellness engineering and rural livelihood development, and social enterprise models, for which he is currently involved in volunteering, innovation, and solutions development. Gopal is currently a board member at Karuna Trust.
Keshava Prasad
Keshava Prasad brings over 25 years of experience in IT and Consulting, Software Development, Product Engineering, Agile and Program Management. He previously worked as the Vice President for Citibank, Singapore. He has extensive working experience in global projects with Department of Health UK, NHS UK, Airlines, Banking. Automotive, Hospitality, and domains in Countries including India, UK, Singapore. Mr. Prasad is also the Project Director and an Advisor to Sampoorna Swaraj Foundation.
Sham N Kayshap
Sham N Kashyap is a Research Fellow at the School of Policy and Governance at Azim Premji University. He is primarily involved in research and advocacy on issues related to rural governance and local service delivery. Sham has a dual Masters degree in Computer Science and Agricultural Economics from Kansas State University, USA. Sham has served as a Panchayat Development Officer with the Government of Karnataka. He has more than 15 years of work experience in the development sector.
Ravi Nagaraja
Ravi is a Co-Founder & Trustee of Sampoorna Swaraj Foundation. Ravi has a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics from Bangalore University. Ravi has over 30 years of experience in managing software companies. He was responsible for building products and IT services business in Manufacturing & Banking/Financial Verticals. Ravi has coached/ mentored software companies to achieve accelerated growth targets process/quality improvement, and organization re-structuring.
Prof. Sadanand Janekere
Janekere Sadananda is a retired Professor of Political Science from Kuvempu University. As part of his work, he designed and implemented a unique certificate course for Elected Members of Gram Panchayats in Karnataka as a collaborative project for Kuvempu University and Department of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj. Professor Sadananda was also a South Asian Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, 1991. Professor Sadanand held the position of Director of Centre for the study of Local Cultures which was a project sponsored by Ghent University, Belgium, and also for the Asia-Link Project sponsored by the European Union.
Nethrakere Udaya Shankara
Mr. Nethrakere previously worked as a Senior Journalist in the journalism field for more than 35 years starting from Hindustan Samachar. He also served in Prajavani and Vijayavani in various capacities from Reporter to Deputy News Editor apart from serving in Janavani, Munjane, Mungaru and Samyukta Karnataka. Mr. Nethrakere is currently a subject matter expert and a content guru for Gram Panchayat education at SSF. He took main role in designing and restructuring of Sampoorna Swaraj Website and writing of Sampoorna Publications books. He designed the Digital Books of Sampoorna Swaraj Foundation also.
Pradeep Pydah
Pradeep Pydah is the CEO of AsterQuanta. He has MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He brings more than 17 years of experience in Silicon Device level Physics-to-AI-Systems where he worked with Intel, Texas Instruments, Cypress Semi and Maxerience. He has built multi-domain technology and operations team from scratch for scale up.