Membership of the notional club of next generation can-do education entrepreneurs, which includes edupreneurs such as P. Kishore (Everonn Education), Shantanu Prakash (Educomp), Gautam Goradia (Yo Knowledge), Atul and Aseem Chauhan (Amity Group) and Saurabh Saxena (Mexus Education) among others, is growing steadily. A new edupreneur who is self-evidently eligible for membership is Hyderabad-based serial entrepreneur Sudhakar Adapa who has introduced the concept of software as a service (SAAS) for schools under the banner of Hebe Edu Technologies Pvt. Ltd, a company promoted by him together with several IIT and IIM graduates in 2009.
“Although the idea of providing schools with IT (information techno-logy)-driven information management systems is not new, the differentiating feature of our Performtrac package is that it offers schools a service rather than product. Our market research indicates that while there is initial enthusiasm for school admin packages, there is considerable reluctance within the teacher and administrative comm-unities to actually use them. Out of this awareness was born the idea of marketing our Performtrac in the SAAS mode,” says Adapa, an economics and business management alumnus of Andhra University and IIM-Calcutta who chose the entrepreneurial path soon after graduating from IIM-C by promoting Adinfusion Advertising Pvt. Ltd in 2004.
According to Adapa, his business model is to “position professionals in every client school to maintain the necessary databases and churn out student performance and related reports required by institutional managements, to free teachers for the job they were hired to do, i.e to teach”. “The hardware and software packages required to operationalise Performtrac are provided and installed by us in client schools entirely free of charge. Our company levies a fee of Rs.50-100 per student per month for the entire package of services provided,” explains Adapa.
With Adinfusion, which specialises in in-film advertising, having grown into “the largest entertainment marketing and celebrity management agency in south India” during the past quinquennium, earlier this year, together with several like-minded people from IITs, Adapa co-promoted Hebe Edu Technologies which has developed and test marketed Performtrac “very successfully”.
“The booming education sector offered the best option of combining enterprise with the public interest,” he says explaining the rationale of his entry into K-XII education. Moreover the company has also partnered with the entertainment electronics major Videocon Industries Ltd under which Hebe Edu Tech develops employability and life skills of engineering graduates which are tested and certified by Videocon.
Bullish about the future of Indian education which is “belatedly being given the attention it deserves”, Adapa is of the opinion that it’s high time there is a system-wide switch of focus from examination scores and certification to measuring actual learning outcomes. “Within Hebe — named after the Greek god of energy and youth — we have built a cohesive team which shares a great vision for the development and transformation of Indian education. We are optimistic that the system is on the threshold of a sea change, and we want to be in the centre of the action,” says Adapa.
Way to go!
Dilip Thakore (Bangalore)