Jaipur Jan 23 (IANS) With a view to giving back to their home towns young ex-IITians are returning to take a shot at creating jobs through their tech ventures in Rajasthan particularly in the field of education. Many of these tech-savvy youngsters realised that education was in dire need of a major change in the state.
"One day we discussed that if travel banking hotels and food can be on phones why not education? That was the trigger. We wanted to build a one-point communication between teachers and students " Madhup Bansal from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT-D) and co-founder and Managing Director of Myly told IANS.
Gaurav Mundra the other co-founder and CEO of Myly realised that his son s school circulars sometimes went missing. "So we brought a centralised app where parents had access to kids timetable results fee deposits and other information via one mobile app " he says. Currently working with 800 academic institutions in India he said they have operations in Dubai and the Philippines and were planning to be in Malaysia soon.
Rishabh Jain from IIT Bombay and COO of Qriyo India s managed home tuition app claimed to be first of its kind says: "Me and Mudit CEO of Qriyo had envisioned to be job creators for around 500 people in our hometowns. So we started operations in Jaipur and Jodhpur. Now it s heartening to see that we have evaluated over 15 000 tutors who are serving over 5 000 students in six cities of India."
Mudit Jain was at the India division of Finmechanics as Country Head and had worked with the consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers US. "The idea of Qriyo originated while searching for a yoga teacher. Despite hundreds of providers listed online I could not find a suitable match." In January 2016 Qriyo was born offering over 400 courses in academics co-curricular extra-curricular and fitness activities Mudit said.
The returnees are all youngsters who wanted to pursue their dreams in distant lands after finishing the most sought-after degree in the country. But a feeling for their roots and a conducive business atmosphere brought them back home to use their knowledge about the cyber world for the benefit of their fellow residents.
Nishant Patni founder and CEO of CultureAlley had finished his IIT from Bombay his post-graduate degree from the US and worked with the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago and two start-ups in Delhi and California when he went to China and struggled to learn a new language.
"If I am struggling this hard to learn a new language what might be the case with others I thought and came up with Hello English which is now India s No. 1 educational app with over 35 million learners " Patni told IANS. According to him Hello English was part of Google s Editor s Choice 2017 and the year before it was named Google s Best Apps of 2016. It now teaches several other languages.
"We got infrastructural support from our hometown Jaipur and this city houses good engineering talent and hence we came here " he said adding that the "real Bharat is outside top cities; the people you encounter here give you a real insight into everything". The company has also got funding from a global venture capital firm.
SRJNA which brings modern innovative aids and methodologies into teaching of science maths and astronomy is among a few players helping schools to set up "tinkering labs". They create a design studio kind of place where students can learn via Robotics and 3-D tools. "We help in setting up innovation labs where teachers demonstrate to ensure students learn quickly by using real practical tools " says Sharad Bansal CEO of SRJNA and an IITian from Delhi.
So impressed was NITI Aayog by the approach that it had decided to set up 500 such labs across the country calling them Atal Tinkering Labs under the Atal Innovation Mission named after the former Prime Minister. It provides Rs 10 lakh for setting up such a lab in a school and a similar amount each year for five years for operational expenses. Amitabh Kant CEO of NITI Aayog had said at the time of launching the programme that "it will provide school students the opportunity to work with tools and equipment fostering inventiveness".
SRJNA got some benefit from a Rajasthan government s incubation scheme. Start-up Oasis has been extending a helping hand to provide start-ups with Rs 25 lakh every year for three years and a built-up area of 25 000 square feet to make their ventures operational. According to Tarun Agrawal portfolio manager at Start-Up Oasis there were 15 IITians who had come back to their hometown to set up tech ventures. But not all took the help of the incubator.
Moinee Foundation which supports "right to quality education" was set up by Arvind Thanvi its Chief Mentor. Thanvi an IITian from Kharagpur left his corporate career with Accenture Mumbai where he worked for a decade as account director. He started smart class intervention with 12 schools in a district by reviving their existing ICT labs. That has now reached over 1 500 schools in nine districts of three states.
"Our community eLibrary programme received traction after being nominated for the Prime Minister s award last year. We are currently setting up over 125 new eLibraries in three states. We also implement community eLibraries in areas without Internet connectivity " Thanvi told IANS.
The prime crop of IITians in the state is bound to attract many other start-ups. Rajasthan s tech fields are set to undergo change led by tech-savvy youngsters who come back.
(Archana Sharma can be reached at archana.s@ians.in)
--IANS
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