The entry of the Manipal Education Group, which over the past half century has focused its energies on higher education, into the primary and secondary schools sector, has created a flutter within the somnolent dovecotes of Indian academia, and generated great expectations within India’s 300 million-strong middle class. Dilip Thakore reports
Although the Central and state government of Karnataka, which also offer heavily subsidised professional education in government-run medical and engineering colleges, tend to regard the 56-year-old Manipal Group (comprising the 19 institutions of the not-for-profit Manipal University, Sikkim-Manipal University and the commercially-driven MEMG International Pvt. Ltd, which together boast an aggregate enrolment of 167,000 students in India and overseas), with a jaundiced eye, within middle class India, the Manipal Group has built itself an enviable, nationwide reputation. There is widespread awareness within shining India that graduates of Manipal institutions transform into highly successful professionals respected around the world (25 percent of Malaysia’s medical practitioners are Manipal University graduates).
Despite government, the left-dominated intelligentsia, and even the Supreme Court naively disapproving the “commercialisation of education”, of which the Manipal Group is widely regarded as a standard bearer, this education conglomerate has won an excellent public reputation for delivering world class professional education at a fraction of tuition prices abroad, and the actual cost of government subsidised education. Hence great expectations and rising excitement about the Manipal Group’s entry into K-12 education.
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A graduate of Manipal University and the Children’s Hospital Wisconsin (USA), this grandson of the legendary T.M.A. Pai (1898-1979) and son of Dr. Ramdas Pai, chancellor of Manipal University, proved himself in Malaysia (2000-2005) by bringing the state-of-the-art Melakka-Manipal Medical College which currently has an enrolment of 1,250 students, on stream.
By all indications, Manipal Group’s entry into the school sector has been carefully planned and timed. The first step was taken in 2008, when the Bangalore-based MEMG International Pvt. Ltd acquired “a significant” equity stake in TutorVista Global Pvt. Ltd at a reported price of Rs.12.5 crore. A short while earlier in November 2007, TutorVista, which employs a pool of over 900 Indian teachers to provide online one-on-one private (mainly maths and science) tuition to school students in the US and Europe at a fraction of the hourly price of private tutoring there — a brilliant new technology-driven initiative which received massive media coverage in the US and India in 2007-08 — had bought over the Bangalore-based Edurite Technologies Pvt. Ltd (estb.2000).
Significantly Edurite, like the Delhi-based Educomp Solutions and Chennai-based Everonn Systems, is a pioneer in installing and equipping ICT-driven smart classes in government and private schools in Karnataka and beyond. Currently Edurite (now a wholly-owned subsidiary of TutorVista) is an ICT services provider to over 3,000 primary and secondary schools across the country.
Thus through deft timing and intelligent investment, the MEMG foray into school education has not only got off to a flying start (since Edurite already boasts 3,000 schools across India in its clients base), it has also acquired the expertise and services of a formidable team of proven edupreneurs and education professionals with great track records. Among them: serial entrepreneur K. Ganesh and his wife Meena, pioneers of the BPO boom of the new millennium, who promoted Customer Asset 24×7 in 2000, which was later acquired by ICICI Bank in 2002 for a reported sum of Rs.105 crore (renamed ICICI One Source).
Subsequently the Ganesh duo promoted TutorVista in 2006 which now also delivers online private tuition to Indian students through Edurite Technologies. And the seriousness of intent of the promoters of Manipal K-12 Education is indicated by the appointment of Meena Ganesh, who after the sale of Customer Asset, had returned to the corporate sector as the chief executive (India) of the British multinational Tesco, for whom she established a back office and IT centre with a headcount of 3,500. Ganesh is chief executive of Manipal K-12 Education.
This augurs well for MEMG’s school education venture because Ganesh, a graduate of Madras University and IIM-Calcutta, brings precious industry and business management experience to Manipal K-12 Education. Her impres-sive curriculum vitae lists senior positions in several blue-chip corporates including NIIT (1985-92), Price Waterhouse (1992-95), Microsoft India (1995-2000), Customer Asset (2000-03) and Tesco (2003-08) before taking charge of Edurite Technologies in September last year.
The confidence the top brass of MEMG exudes about the company’s sure success in K-12 school education is based on the sound foundation built for this new enterprise by Edurite Technologies. Although the annual revenue of Edurite (estb. 2000), which is expected to cross the Rs.25 crore mark in fiscal 2008-09, pales in comparison with ICT market leaders such as the Delhi-based Educomp Solutions (Rs.276 crore in 2007-08), and the Chennai-based Everonn Systems (Rs.91.23 crore) — a consequence which Edurite sources attribute to deeper and more thorough content research and development (“rather than content aggregation”) — the new arrangement will give it a massive boost. Currently the company which has 350 employees, delivers ICT-enabled supplementary education services to 2,000 government and 1,000 private schools around the country, says Srikanth B. Iyer, a computer science graduate of Bangalore University with a postgrad degree from Harvard who co-promoted Edurite Technologies Pvt. Ltd in 2000, with the objective of “using technology to enable K-12 education”.
Built on sound foundations, such optimism about the future of the Manipal K-12 initiative seems justified. Following MEMG’s strategic purchase of an equity stake in TutorVista just after the latter company had subsumed Edurite Technologies, the new company is endowed with the experience and domain knowledge of all three entities now agglomerated under the Manipal K-12 umbrella. Moreover the outcome of this series of mergers and acquisitions, and intelligent financial engineering is that Manipal K-12 Education Pvt. Ltd is now a multi-divisional corporate with five high-potential businesses, viz, i-Classroom, school management services, digital software provision, Edurite tutorials (tech-enabled tuition centres promoted countrywide to prepare students for class X, XII and public entrance exams), and retail (marketing over 150 products and consumables required by individual learners).
However much of the confidence of the bullish top management of Manipal K-12 Education flows from a huge investment that the MEMG-TutorVista partnership has made in the company’s backroom research and development operation, the traditional blindspot of Indian industry and academia.
News of the absorption of Edurite Technologies into the new company, Manipal K-12 Education, has winged its way across the country arousing high expectations within Edurite’s 3,000-strong customer base. “Although we have installed our own hardware in our classrooms, we have been using the textbook mapped software of Edurite Technolgies in our ICSE schools for the past two years with a fair degree of satisfaction. Now with the takeover of Edurite by Manipal K-12 we expect the speed of customisation of mapped curriculums which has been slow, to improve in the near future,” says Moideen Kutty, the chairman-promoter of the MES Group (estb.1970) of institutions in Tirur, Kerala which runs 28 schools and 20 colleges with an aggregate enrolment of 37,000 students in India’s most literate state.
Against this backdrop of flashing green lights for the mint-fresh Manipal K-12 Education, it’s hardly surprising that Umashankar Vishvanath, the cheerful president of the company who intends to focus his attention on the continuous development of all schools under the Manipal K-12 umbrella, is confident about the success of this carefully strategised and engineered company in the booming primary-secondary education marketplace. An economics alum of Madras University with an MBA from Delhi University’s highly reputed Faculty of Management Studies, Vishvanath who signed up with Manipal K-12 last July (2008), brings a wealth of education experience to his critical new assignment having served with several blue-chip IT companies including Wipro, Tata Unisys, Motorola, and a long stint (2000-06) with ILFS-ETS, a pioneer in popularising new technology-enabled education in India.
Quite obviously the carefully planned, and purposeful entry of the highly reputed Manipal Group into school education isn’t good news for market leaders Everonn, Educomp, NIIT and ILFS-ETS. Yet it’s pertinent to bear in mind that between them they have reached hardly 1 percent of India’s 1.24 million primary and secondary schools countrywide, and at best a mere 4 percent of the country’s 75,000 private schools.
Therefore there is room enough for all of them in the country’s grossly under-served school education market. Moreover intensifying competition in the K-12 education services is certain to spur the research and development efforts of the country’s leading ICT-driven companies, which cannot but do India’s obsolescent school education sector a whole lot of good.
It’s also important to note that the market development efforts of India’s rapidly multiplying ICT-driven education services companies are not restricted to private schools. Acknowledging the sheer number of government — Central, state and municipal — schools (1.89 million) leading corporates in ICT-driven school services have wired up government schools as well.
Thus Educomp has planted its corporate flag in 7,300 government schools, Everonn Systems in 4,442 K-12 government schools and Manipal K-12 (through Edurite) in over 2,000. For the lay public, the greatest benefit of the Manipal K-12 initiative will be reduction of the stress and strain that millions of middle class households are subject to at the start of each academic year, when there is an annual stampede for admission forms of the much-too-few schools offering acceptable quality education at affordable prices.
In a season of all-pervasive gloom following the global economic meltdown, that’s a welcome silver lining .
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