Every school has a founding day. Ours has a foundation stone — laid on the 29th of March, 1999, by a woman who was making good on a promise to the man she loved.

It started with a promise

My father, Shri Gopal C. Sharma, spent most of his life believing that good education should not be reserved for the privileged. He didn’t speak about it grandly. He simply lived as though he believed it — sharing what he knew, helping young people in his neighbourhood, mentoring anyone who walked through his door.

He dreamed of building a school. A real one. A school where any child, regardless of where their family came from or what they could afford, could walk in and be taken seriously. He never got to see it built.

So on the 29th of March, 1999, my mother, Smt. Sunitadevi Gopal Sharma, laid the foundation stone of what would become Gopal Sharma Schools. It was her way of keeping his dream alive.

That single decision, quiet, determined, deeply personal, is the reason every classroom in our schools exists today.

The first children

Powai in 1999 wasn’t what it is today. The lake was here, of course the same Powai Lake that still sits a short walk from our school gates but the neighbourhood around it was quieter, more residential, less of a corporate hub than it would become. Families lived close to one another. Parents knew their children’s teachers by name.Our first batches of students reflected that intimate, close-knit Powai. Small classes. Teachers who knew every parent’s first name. Long conversations at the school gate at pickup. Birthdays remembered. Bad days noticed.

Many of those children are now adults. Some have come back to us, as parents enrolling their own children, as teachers in our classrooms, as alumni who drop in to say hello when they’re in town. When we say GSS is a family, we don’t mean it in a marketing sense. We mean it in the sense that the children we taught twenty years ago still feel like ours.

From one school to many

We never set out to build a group. We set out to build one good school. The growth happened the way growth often does in education, because parents asked for it.

Gopal Sharma Memorial School (GSMS)

Our flagship school grew steadily through the early 2000s, rooted in the values our founder had insisted on from day one — academic excellence held in equal balance with character, faith and community.

Gopal Sharma International School (GSIS)

As Powai changed, the families who lived here changed too. Many parents were now working in international companies, raising children who would likely travel and study globally. We responded by building GSIS, designed to offer a more internationally-oriented learning experience while keeping the heart and ethos of GSMS intact.

Gopal Sharma Blooming Buds (GSBB)

Then came the youngest learners. We realised that the foundation years, Nursery, Junior KG, Senior KG, were too important to be treated as a warm-up act. They deserved their own school. Their own teachers. Their own thinking.

So we created Gopal Sharma Blooming Buds. Then a second branch. Then a third. Today GSBB welcomes our youngest children at Saki Vihar, Powai Vihar and Hiranandani Gardens, with our dedicated Daycare giving working parents a place where their children are genuinely cared for, not just supervised.

Chandrabhan Sharma Junior and Degree College

And finally, the journey continues beyond school. Many of our students didn’t want to leave the GSS family at the end of Grade 12, so under the GHP Education umbrella, Chandrabhan Sharma Junior and Degree College now offers them a place to continue their higher education while staying within the community they’ve grown up in.

Today, more than twelve thousand children study with us across these campuses. That number still surprises us when we say it out loud.

What hasn’t changed

In twenty-six years, a lot has changed. Buildings, technology, syllabi, uniforms, even the city itself. Powai today is unrecognisable from the Powai of 1999.

But four things haven’t moved.

First, we are still steadfast in faith. Faith in our values, faith in each child’s potential, faith in the kind of citizens we want to send out into the world. That phrase, ‘steadfast in faith,’ is still printed on our vision statement because it still describes how we work.

Second, we still believe education is life itself, not preparation for it. We refuse to reduce a child’s school years to a stepping stone toward some imagined future. The years matter on their own.

Third, we still operate as a charitable trust. The Smt. Durgadevi Sharma Charitable Trust governs everything we do. Our social responsibilities, educational discounts for those who need them, staff concessions, healthcare support, scholarships, community access, are not add-ons. They’re how the institution was built.

Fourth, we still know our students. Even across twelve thousand children, our teachers still know their students by name, by personality, by the small things that matter. That has not changed and it will not change.

Where we’re going next

We are at an interesting moment as a school group. The next generation of trustees, Mr. Dikshant Sharma, Mr. Himanshu Sharma and Mr. Yugank Sharma, are now actively guiding the institution into its next chapter.

Our focus over the next few years is not on expanding into more cities or building larger campuses. It’s on going deeper. Stronger faculty development. More thoughtful pedagogy. Better integration of technology where it genuinely helps, and resistance to it where it doesn’t. More space for art, music, sport, and the quieter forms of intelligence that don’t show up on report cards.

We want the GSS our youngest children join today to feel even more like home than the GSS that welcomed our first batch in 1999.

That’s the work.

Want to see what a GSS campus feels like today? Visit us — we’d love to show you around. Call 022-45266000 or write to admissions@gopalsharmaschools.com to book a walkthrough.

With gratitude,

The Gopal Sharma Family