Bright prospects in education

Business prospects are bright across India’s education sector, ranging from e-learning to doctorate courses, industry experts said during the international awards presentation held by Singapore-based Business Excellence & Research Group (BERG).

Specialists are working out programmes and curriculums for e-bags, in the form of tablets, and English language courses through mobile phone calls within India’s ever growing internet network in the coming years.

Foreign educationists are proposing partnerships with Indian institutions to share their global experiences in the mega market where the government has already launched a series of initiatives to skill the youths.

“The Indian market is in great demand of language classes that are more communicative and less focused on the traditional grammar-translation method,” said Bernard Golstein, chief executive and co-founder of the Singapore-based VivaLing, an online language learning establishment.

“VivaLing is currently exploring ways of a vast market entry, both in B2C (retail mode) and B2S (partnerships with schools). B2C is usually one-to-one classes, while B2S usually caters to small groups of up to 10 people, lowering the costs while still offering excellent teachers and teaching quality,” said Golstein.

Vivaling teaches online Mandarin, Spanish and French and its students include Indians.

Reflecting the strong sentiment, Malaysia’s Binary University is looking for more partners to set up in India, having established its first link for Loyola International School in Chennai recently.

“The partners in India can be Chambers of Commerce where senior managers and CEOs reside, and or it could be a good business school,” Joseph Adaikalam, Binary executive chairman

Courses based on Binary curriculum will be offered through Loyola from January 2017, said Prof. Adaikalam.

No matter how challenging the environment, Indian educationists are reaching out to the remote regions and tribal folks in deep forests.

“We have reached out to the deepest of the forest of Chhattisgarh and bring out some really good students from forest dwelling tribal society to learn English,” said Ashutosh Tripathy, executive director of the Krishna Public School which has 20 schools in the central state.

“It is high time we reach out to the students from tribal folks and give them skill, rather than just education,” stressed Tripathy.

“There is so much to do in one state,” he said of the potential of teaching in Chhattisgarh where it has enrolled over 40,000 students.

New Delhi-based eAge EduSolutions will increase its student intake in the coming year to 300,000 from 120,000 as of this year.

Chander K Madan, CEO and founder of e-Age, said his group has linked up with Hindustan Unilever which is sponsoring 300,000 students in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu as part of the Corporate Social Responsible programme from next year.

“We are teaching spoken English, office dressing and interview skill to these students who comes from a very humble background,” he said after receiving BERG’s Innovative EduTech Company award.

The six-year old eAge will expand its curriculum to cover maths and science subjects in the next six months, said Madan.

Dehradun-based Graphic Era Educational Group was also recognized for its technical education, and placing for some 2,000 IT students a year with multi-national corporations in the country.

Graphic Era’s president Prof. Dr Kamal Ghanshala his institution, with three campus, was now expanding to add a medical college, starting with 150 MBBS students and a hospital of 300-500 beds in the coming two years.

“We have a very clear cut vision to improve the quality of education in the country,” added Sachin Sharma, Registrar at Sonepat-based Ashoka University.

BERG presented its annual “Icons of Learning Awards 2016” on 24 November to: GEMS Academy (Singapore), The Aryan International School (Varanasi), PSB Academy (Singapore), Phoenix World School (Pune), Binary University (Malaysia), Tagore International School (New Delhi), Brickfield Asia College (Malaysia), Ashoka University (Sonepat), Graphic Era University (Dehradun), eAge Solutions (New Delhi), and Krishna Public School (Raipur). fii-news.com