Our Team
Pushpa Aman Singh, Founder, GuideStar India
Pushpa founded GuideStar India (www.guidestarindia.org) in 2009 in her quest for building trust and transparency in India’s civil society. After a decade of innovation and growth in India’s retail financial services sector, she crossed over to the social sector in 2001 to lead GiveIndia, India’s first online giving marketplace.
Pushpa has established GuideStar India as a friend of the NPO community, working with them to voluntarily embrace transparency and enhancing their capacity to access philanthropic resources. With more than 12,250 Indian nonprofits on GuideStar India, she drives citizens and businesses to discover, engage and support NPOs.
Pushpa pioneered the development and use of NPO due diligence frameworks in India since 2001. In 2015, Pushpa launched a rigorous certification programme for NPOs which is recognised as a standard for identifying credible NGOs in India and is being emulated by other emerging economies. She led India’s most comprehensive NPO Sector Survey 2022-23 for the India’s Million Missions Report and leads GuideStar India as the country partner for the CAP Doing Good Index for Asian economies. In 2017, Pushpa launched in India, #GivingTuesday, a global giving movement to promote generosity.
Pushpa worked intensively with the Maharashtra government constituted high-powered committee for reforms in charity administration. She served on the Technical Group constituted by SEBI for the Social Stock Exchange and is engaged in the development of India’s first SSEs through her role as the member of SEBI’s SSE Advisory Committee, BSE’s SSE Governing Council, NISM’s Examination Committee for Social Impact Assessors and advises the Capacity Building Fund for the Social Stock Exchange.
Pushpa is an MBA Gold Medalist from Gujarat University and a Senior Global Fellow of the Synergos Institute, New York.
Lathika Rajan, Senior Manager- Programmes
After graduating from the Mumbai University, Lathika spent 8 years in retail banking operations, CRM and other back office processes at Tata eServe Ltd and Citigroup Global Services Ltd. before she joined GuideStar India in 2009. She leads Programmes and Technology.
As a founding team member, Lathika has been a key team member growing the NGO database. She is the custodian for data quality and data integrity. Lathika manages partnerships for data acquisition and data use. Lathika works closely with overseas technology partners for site development, maintenance and improvement. She implements GuideStar India’s efforts to promote efficient data sharing among intermediaries. Lathika leads GuideStar India's NGO capacity building and certification programme that helps NGO learn and adopt stellar transparency and public accountability practices.
NGO Capacity Building and Certification:
Sangeeta Mukherjee (Asansol, West Bengal)
Sanjyot Kamath (Chennai)
Rachana Howale
Pranali Bhosale
Operations:
Gopika Elango, an M Com ranker, is an all-rounder! She manages NGO relationships across programmes, responds to all enquiries, supports NGOs through the verification and certification process, manages the Mumbai office and assists the Founder in new projects.
(All team members are based in Mumbai unless stated otherwise.)