Seeking professional success: Harappa goes back to the drawing board

Harappa offers 25 courses at a price of Rs 899 per course for newcomers

What are the five elements you need to succeed in professional life? The five habits, so to speak. No matter which field, industry, sector or firm, you need to be able to think clearly while cutting through complex information; to be able to problem solve; to communicate and express yourself with clarity and, at times, persuasion; to be able to collaborate; and carry others with you.

Yet, nobody really tells you this or explains how you can inculcate these foundational qualities or skills. Harappa hopes to change that.

The story of Harappa, a new homegrown edtech, begins sometime in 2000, when McKinsey partner and consultant Pramath Sinha found a new passion. To assist and build unique and high quality higher education institutions in a country starved of choices. After acting as the founding dean of Indian school of Business (ISB), Hyderabad (on loan from McKinsey), he joined the efforts of Ashish Dhawan and Sanjeev Bikhchandani to build Ashoka University, India’s first liberal arts private college at Sonepat, as founder & trustee.

Post that, Sinha built the Vedica Scholars Programme, advised and mentored the Anant National University, the Naropa Fellowship, JK Lakshmipat University, and many more – steering almost 20 private higher education offerings in India across disciplines.

Yet, in 2018, he realised he was running to stay at the same spot. If he added up the full annual intake of all the brick-and-mortar institutions he’d birthed or mentored, it wouldn’t add up to more than 4,000-odd students – a drop in the ever-growing ocean of youth looking to graduate.

That’s when Sinha started looking at the online education space carefully. Watching both global and local developments unfold, he grew increasingly convinced that the way forward for Indian higher education was embedded in technology. The impact that a good online product could deliver was many times what institutions limited by walls and the number of teachers could.

For, while many brick and mortar institutions — some would argue, a majority — do offer in-person courses, teaching and classes, often these are of a very indifferent quality. The mismatch between what the industry needs and what the education system throws up is glaring and has been widening, adding to the number of unemployed youth.

However, what Sinha also noticed was that no matter which online higher education site he went on, they all appeared like clones of one another. Everyone offered a plethora of courses in data sciences, artificial intelligence, machine learning, coding. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking the whole world had turned into one large tech factory.

From global giants like Coursera, Udemy and edX to the homegrown UpGrad and more recently AshokaX, almost everyone was offering “the same wine in different casks”.

In the last few years, over 4,600 edtech firms have sprung up in India alone, and the space has exploded since the pandemic put the brakes on traditional classes.

Sinha, chairman and chief inspirer, and his co-founder Shreyasi Singh, CEO and chief warrior, who had worked with him on the Vedica Scholars Programme and was keen to go entrepreneurial, hit upon an idea: Why not offer an online product that taught what you “really” needed to know? The five habits that you need to develop to find your eventual place in the sun.

Sinha says nobody tells you these five things “early enough” and even if these five habits had at some point been an integral part of our education system, their value and significance has been “lost” over the years. There are no competitors in the space as few are focused on the foundational skills Harappa is aiming at.

Harappa went live in April 2019. As of now, the site offers 25 courses — five for each habit: think, solve, communicate, collaborate and lead — at a price of Rs 899 per course for newcomers. It targets companies that may want their employees to take the courses, colleges, and higher education institutions as well as individual users.

The content is created in-house for each self-paced course — typically requiring 5-7 hours each — although experts and consultants are pulled in to ensure the quality of what is on offer is top-notch.

Courses are not lectures by one voice but a mix of academicians and practitioners bringing the material alive. Case studies, graphics and live examples create diversions that ensure the student does not “zone out”. The start-up recently raised its first round of funding (undisclosed) from James Murdoch, who was CEO of 21st Century Fox from 2015 to 2019. It has a team of 130 employees, with an average age of 30.

So far, the site offers no degree or certificate but the founders are not ruling it out.

Although an English language online learning platform, the founders were keen that it is easily identifiable as Indian and is evocative of India’s rich cultural fabric, hence the name Harappa.

Shreyasi says three key features — pioneering, foundational and timeless — of the Harappan civilisation echoed with their thoughts of what they’d like the venture to stand for. “Harappa is Indian and reflects everything we wanted the platform to represent,” she says.

The founders have their sights set high, aiming for a revenue of  Rs 500 crore by the end of 2025 with the firm belief that the world is an oyster if you have the right pearls on offer.