Leading Beyond Legacy

Srisha Mohandoss co-founded Ruh Early Years in 2021 and Ruh Continuum School in 2022, extending the reach of SSVM Institutions, the 16-campus Tamil Nadu education group founded by her mother, Dr. Manimekalai Mohan, three of whose campuses Srisha built herself. She launched Ruh at 24. As Director at SSVM, she oversees the international curricula initiatives across the group, which together with its CBSE, Cambridge, and IB-affiliated schools serves more than 12,000 students and 1,000 educators.

SSVM has grown from a single campus in 1998 to sixteen today. After a Bachelor of Commerce in Entrepreneurship from the University of British Columbia and two years at an educational training company, Srisha returned to India in 2018 and joined SSVM to lead its expansion into international curricula. She earned her Master of Education from the University of Sydney, graduating with a near-perfect GPA. What she built operates on different terms from anything the group had attempted before. She describes Ruh as an effort to bring global education to Coimbatore and to build a meaningful learning pathway for the youngest citizens of tomorrow.

Ruh began in Coimbatore as an early years centre admitting children from under one year of age, a model among the first of its kind in India. It has since grown into a continuum: a K–5 campus offering the International Baccalaureate up to the Primary Years Programme, and a K–12 campus that carries the Ruh philosophy from infancy through to Grade 12. The early years curriculum draws on the Science of Early Learning from Harvard University, the Reggio Emilia approach from Italy, Montessori principles, and Design Thinking. Rather than adapt an existing model, Srisha assembled the programme from the research up, choosing the frameworks she judged most rigorous and building the institution around them.

The school’s physical design is as deliberate as its pedagogy. Srisha spearheaded the vision behind Ruh’s award-winning architecture, drawing on principles from Harvard’s Learning Environment for Tomorrow programme to design spaces that reflect how children actually learn, where the building itself is treated as a teaching instrument rather than a backdrop. The result has become one of the school’s defining features. In five years, Ruh has grown to more than 1,000 students and now ranks first in Tamil Nadu for both curriculum innovation and infrastructure, an unusual distinction for a school still in its first decade.

That same instinct, to address the system rather than only its output, led to her most structural undertaking. Srisha founded the Ruh Learning & Innovation Centre, a professional development hub for educators. Rather than competing to recruit trained teachers, she chose to build the pipeline that produces them, raising teaching standards across the region from within and giving Ruh a steady supply of educators formed in its own philosophy.

Srisha is part of the inaugural cohort of the Cambridge School Leadership Programme and is pursuing the Education Leadership Programme at Harvard University. A recognised thought leader in Indian education, she has received numerous accolades for her contributions to the field and to social entrepreneurship. As a TEDx speaker, she has explored how early childhood experiences shape adult life, and the case this makes for serious investment in the earliest years of education. She serves as President of the AFS Coimbatore Chapter, the intercultural exchange organisation, and was nominated to the AFS Youth Assembly in Geneva.

Outside the institution, she is a trained classical musician with multiple released albums and a national gold medallist in 10-metre air rifle shooting, pursuits that reflect the same discipline and standard she applies to the schools she builds.

Srisha Mohandoss inherited a legacy with deep roots in Tamil Nadu’s education landscape. Rather than rest on it, she built an identity of her own through her initiatives, and the Ruh schools have become among the most sought-after in the region. What she has built alongside that legacy, from infant classrooms to an award-winning campus to a development centre for educators, is not an extension of it so much as a deliberate departure, an argument that the best use of an inheritance is to take it somewhere it could not have gone on its own.