Digital classrooms move deeper into India

Students in tier-2 cities are having best of both schooling worlds

Rakesh Mishra, a 13-year-old student in Bherunda village in Nagaur district Rajasthan is just learning how a heart dissection of a toad is to be done. But his hands are not messy nor does he feel disgusted watching the procedure. He is, in fact, watching the whole process on the screen using a digital classroom in his school. Mishra may be disappointed that he belongs to a lesser known village, but is delighted that he can avail of ICT enabled solutions in his village classroom similar to his urban peers.  Digital classroom service providers including Educomp Solutions, Pearson Education Service, Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) and Birla Shloka Edutech have percolated into the non-metro regions of India to provide such services.

"We have customers across Tier 1, Tier 2 and smaller towns also.  Schools whether big or small have realised the power of getting multimedia based content to support the teaching in the class room," said Meena Ganesh, MD and CEO, Pearson Education Service. Ganesh also added that since they offered solutions to schools on a build operate transfer mode, the affordability is very high. The schools acquire the solution over a 3 or 5-year contract period through a monthly payment basis. This typically is in the range of Rs 100 to 150 per student per month.

The total market size for digital classrooms was an estimated 3000 crores in 2011 and is expected to grow at over 25% this year, according to Abhinav Dhar, Director K 12, Educomp Solutions. He informed that there is still potential for digitizing over 800,000 classrooms among the smaller towns. This is not just restricted to private schools, but Smartclass pilots are also underway in some government schools.

Educomp's Smartclass, the digital classroom solution has been adopted by over 10,000 schools across cities/small towns and rural areas spread across 560 districts in the country. Besides metros, large cities and towns, Smartclass is present in schools even in little known places like Bherunda (Rajasthan), Barot (Himachal Pradesh) and Samba (Jammu & Kashmir) among others. Today over 70% of Educomp Smartclass adoptions are taking place in schools in Tier 2/3/4 cities and deep rural countryside, said Dhar.

The child centric concept in classrooms is what has prompted schools to adopt this technology believed N Srikrishna, Managing Director, Birla Shloka Edutech. The company which has offered ICT solutions to 542 tribal schools across Maharashtra and are present in 200 private schools in the state, now are looking to expand in the nearby regions of Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Pondicherry. The company gets 40% revenue from technology solutions.

Birla Shloka Edutech, going a step further, is planning to build 100 plus schools across India enabled with digital classrooms. Srikrishna further added that to make the solutions affordable, the company has two different school solutions. One is the 'Open-Mind' schools for the affordable category and other is the Shloka schools for the affluent category. Both the schools would have hi-tech classroom solutions.

The potential of the market is so high, that even big corporate players like TIS are aiming for deeper penetration. Rajesh Shethia, Head-Sales & Marketing-Schools Division at TIS explained that they are looking to extend the solutions to each and every district in the coming years. They have even started getting 50% revenue from Tier 3 and Tier 4 regions. "It is a logical step. Availability of decent teachers in smaller towns has always been an issue. Therefore, it makes sense for teachers and parents to go for these solutions instead of shifting the child to a larger town for education," he explained. The content offered is customised to the needs of the particular school, to be able to meet their particular requirements.

On an average, the cost per classroom is Rs 5,000 per month and if the whole school is to be digitised, it may cost about Rs 1 crore. Players see smaller towns going for overall digitisation, rather than single classroom digitisation. "This is, inspite of the fact that the costs for the solutions, in small towns and big cities being the same," added Shethia.

Challenges are also present in these markets, said industry players. Internet connectivity, to enable cloud solutions has been a major challenge, according to Shethia of TIS. Getting the infrastructure down to these areas is another challenge cited by the players. But, the acceptance overshadows the challenge. "Three years back, schools in smaller towns were averse to the whole concept. Now atleast they are open to it," opined Shethia. 

The service providers, however, believe that this is not the end. "There are close to 15 lakhs government schools and 1 lakh private schools in the country. Out of this, only 7-10% of the private schools have tapped the potential of multimedia classroom teaching whereas in government schools, it has barely made any inroads," Dhar concluded.