‘Better teachers make better students’
Nirav Khambahti, 43, was hand picked by the Tata Group chairman Cyrus Mistry — who wanted to look at education not just from a profit motive but from the point of view of what impact it could create — to handle the Tata’s education foray. KHAMBAHTI, CEO, Tata ClassEdge in an interview with Anjuli Bhargava talks about how the company is working with schools and leveraging technology to improve learning outcomes. Edited excerpts What exactly is Tata Classedge trying to do ? We started operations in 2011. Tata Interactive — a sister firm — has been supplying elearning solutions for large global organisations for the last 25 years. How best to use technology to improve learning outcomes is their main focus. So in 2011, we took a stab at trying to improve quality at schools in India. What we did was to work on the premise that better teachers make better students. We may want to impart 21st century skills but teachers seem to have been left behind in the process. Training systems are thoroughly inadequate. We decided to use technology — which we all know is here to stay — to equip teachers in the classroom so that they deliver lesson plans in a new and interactive manner. We have taken the NCERT syllabus and created a digital tool kit for teachers. So how many schools agreed to try this? We expanded rather quickly — almost 2000 schools across India — and then realized we had made a mistake. We realized very quickly that not every school is philanthropic in nature. We found a large number of schools not paying for our products. Two, the cost of servicing these schools was huge — it takes a lot of handholding and was becoming very expensive.
So in 2014, the group actually took a step back and consolidated. We decided to be more discrete in the schools we work with and now it is around 1200-1300. Are you making money from the initiative ? Yes, we charge schools on a per classroom basis with the objective that if we become self sustaining, the intellectual property that we create, we can use that to make a difference at schools who cannot afford it.
At government schools, we don’t charge anything — 250 have been done free of charge and 250 more are in the pipeline.
We don’t give out numbers but let me say at 15,000 classrooms now we have achieved a break even at the operating level. We are covering our costs and we are not in a hurry to make money. If we look at profits too early, we may have to curtail our investment cycles. In businesses like this, you have to dig your heels very deep in. What are some of your key learnings so far ? We have changed the user interface over time after we realized that in India there are a number of teachers who have never used a PC. But they are familiar with smart phones. So we have changed a lot of the interface to adapt to this.
Second, since the company has access to a lot of content so we thought why not make it available in other ways directly to children. We have now put the content on tablets used by students at home. Also, we have created a series for Tata Sky. In addition, we will soon be launching an online content channel of our own. We want to try and reach around 10 million students by 2025. We are currently at 4 million.