A clear sign that the hitherto dormant Indian education sector is beginning to wake up is the rush of young entrepreneurs entering this line of business. Yet by referring to the business of education, I am on shaky ground. Although the whole country is well aware that education is a business involving raising and investing resources and balancing the books, in the offices of government in New Delhi and state capitals and even in the hallowed portals of the Supreme Court, the polite fiction is maintained that provision of education is necessarily a charitable activity, which must remain divorced from vulgar commerce.
In the fantasy world of Indian officialdom, great institutions of learning should ideally be built by government — a duty which the Central, state and local governments have conspicuously failed to discharge for the past half century plus, judging by the fact that over 400 million Indian citizens are comprehensively illiterate and the rest of the population is at best functionally literate. Or they should be established by kind-hearted philanthropists with unlimited wealth which they must keep pouring into education institutions because if they make — heaven forbid — a profit or surplus for reinvestment, that’s “commercialisation of education”, the dirtiest words in the lexicon of Indian education.
It’s against this backdrop of severe funds constraints in the public education system and private unaided institutions obliged to watch their step, that a steadily growing number of education entrepreneurs are entering the K-12 education sector which is fortunately less regulated than higher education. In particular, the country’s thriving 300 million-strong middle class which shuns the public education system and patronises the country’s 80,000 private K-12 schools en masse, is ready, willing and able to pay for high-quality globally benchmarked school education. It offers a massive, fast-track market for new age ICT and related content edupreneurs.
In EducationWorld we have always welcomed the opportunity to write about the people, products, processes and services of new genre of edupreneurs. Therefore in the recent past we have written sui generis cover stories on Everonn Education, Educomp Solutions, NIIT, Manipal K-12, Helix Technologies and iDiscoveri among other new age edupreneurs who are revolutionising the teaching-learning scenario in India.
And to this list add the name of Mexus Education whose young promoters have set themselves the goal of reinventing school education. To this end, after two years of intensive market and product research, they have positioned Mexus as an end-to-end school education products and services company which is all set to take the increasingly receptive primary-secondary market for new age learning by storm. Read about the plans and ambitious aspirations of the New Chargers (Mexus co-sponsored the Deccan Chargers team in the recently concluded IPL 2010 T-20 cricket tournament) of K-12 education in our mid-year cover story.
Our special report feature in this issue which places the recently enacted Right to Free & Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka the RTE Act) under the microscope, is no less important. It features the views of top school principals countrywide on its more controversial and contentious provisions.
