digitalLEARNING-Apr-2010-[46-47]-My Journey-Tracking the life and times of the Acheivers-Sridhar Raj

my journey

Tracking the life and times of the acheivers It was probably in my class 3 or 4 history textbook that I read that ‘Augustus Caeser completely transformed Rome. When he became emperor, it was not a great city.

But when he died, it was completely transformed with miles of good roads and good facilities’. Somehow, those lines have always stayed with me. Years later, some of us asked ourselves ‘Can one person (or a small group of people) change the world?” and told ourselves that the answer was ‘yes’!

Sridhar Rajagopalan, Managing Director, Educational Initiatives Pvt Ltd. (EI)

All-India Exposure: I did my schooling in Calcutta and Delhi, engineering in Madras and have now lived for the past 15 years in Ahmedabad, giving me a strong basis to claim to be ‘all-Indian’. I got a ZX Spectrum home computer thanks to a generous uncle in the US when I was in class 9, and at IIT Madras moved from punch cards to a Siemens mainframe computer. IIM Ahmedabad upgraded their PC lab (from XTs!) the year I was there and I was in-charge of the lab. At IIT, I used to bunk my engineering drawing classes (having had the advantage of already having done that in class 11 and 12) to work on my passion – computers!

Mr Sunil Handa’s LEM Course: At IIM, I went through my First Life Changing Experience. It was a course called ‘Laboratory in Entrepreneurial Motivation’ offered

by Mr Sunil Handa. I did not do the course because I wanted to be an entrepreneur –I had no such clarity. I took it because it was ‘different’ (the same reason I took Prof Indira Parikh Exploration of Roles and Identities course which was also a rewarding experience).

LEM taught us many super-critical things the Indian educational system does not. (Unfortunately, only the partly converted take such off-beat courses in the first place.) We learnt that an entrepreneur is one who challenges the givens. We interacted with people like Dr Verghese Kurien of Amul. We learnt the value of regularly reflecting, working hard and persevering. This course probably laid the seeds of entrepreneurship in me.

IBM: The year I graduated from IIM, I joined IBM (then Tata-IBM), but the timing could not have been worse. IBM was going through it first major loss in history and had to bring in an outsider Lou Gerstner to rescue it. IBM treated the Indian operation as a distributor, and the only focus in Tata-IBM was to sell computers priced 2-3 times that of competition!

Without the maturity to understand the need for sales, I saw the company as not focussing on product and technology.

More importantly, I was asking people how the work we were doing was meaningful – ‘should we not be using IT to change lives for the better?

Eklavya: Convinced that I was not working to find ‘real solutions to real problems’, I was wondering what to do next. In September 1995, I made a trip to Ahmedabad with Venkat to visit Mr Sunil Handa who had the crazy idea of starting the school. By the end of the day-long meeting, Venkat and I had decided to join (to start) the school! Many people including friends and family thought I was crazy (something I had never contested any way). I am leaving the world’s largest computer company and home in Delhi to start a school in Ahmedabad? (Remember, this was 7-8 years before starting a school had become a cool – and profitable and headline grabbing – thing!)

I have often been asked how I took the decision, whether it was difficult, whether I have regretted it, etc. Frankly, it was not a difficult decision, and I have never regretted it. Yes, we took pay cuts, but I think my keen desire to make a real difference made this an easy decision. I somehow felt that working with Mr Handa and Venkat and Sudhir (my other colleague who passed out of IIMA a year after Venkat and me), I would be able to achieve much bigger things that I could in an MNC or a typical career.

We did a lot in the 5-6 years in Eklavya and the school. One of the most important learning experiences was the extensive visits we made to schools across (and also some outside India). We got to see many schools closely. We did a number of things at Eklavya - we offered scholarships to bright and needy students in many colleges in and near Ahmedabad, started an annual award for the best teachers for the city, admitted 20-25% of school students from street children, created a teacher training course, started a poster campaign to celebrate teachers, studied Montessori and Froebel in depth, offered parenting courses and many other things that were both interesting and gratifying. Slowly the school also established itself well in the city.

Once the school and teacher training college were established, we started thinking about next steps. The Gujarat 2000 earthquake had given us an introduction to rural education at close quarters and we got involved in rebuilding a school in an earthquake-affected area. But I had also identified a larger problem – that of rote learning – and wanted to do something to tackle rote learning in all schools. That was how we started Educational Initiatives in 2001.

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Vipassana: The 6 years I spent at Eklavya gave me a lot, but one of the most important things they gave me was an accidental introduction to Vipassana meditation. It would be fair to call it My 2nd Life Changing Experience. The idea of 10 day silence was fascinating. I went as an open-minded sceptic, but came back transformed. Since 2001, I have gone for the 10-day course every year (along with my wife) and I practise 1-2 hours of meditation daily.

One of the things I have learnt from Vipassana has been this simple philosophy: ‘always ask if you are adding value. Try to add value without looking for personal gain. Keep checking if your intentions are good (and your mind is pure) – if they are, you cannot do bad. Identify your weaknesses, and smilingly but tirelessly keep trying to overcome them.’ I think this philosophy applies equally to an individual and a company.

Starting Educational Initiatives: In 2001, we started EI – Venkat, who was already running Give Foundation, contributed part of his time to EI and Sudhir joined a few months later. Our vision in EI was to help remove rote learning from the Indian educational system. I feel we have made a lot of headway in the last 8-9 years and we can actually sense ‘victory’ in the next few years. It has been an exhilarating experience.

One of the ideas I have always strongly believed in was to go for a for-profit model (though the intent never was to make money). I believe for-profits should be allowed to run schools – not because I am for people making money from schools and becoming rich, but because I believe this model will attract the best to the field and encourage innovative solutions.

EI was the first time we were running a company completely on our own. We were fanatical about doing it 100% honestly and especially about 3-4 years ago when we switched 100% to legal software, I felt our resolve was strengthened even further.

ASSET: We had enough firsthand experience in our years at Eklavya that rote learning dominates our teaching-learning systems. Instead of preaching, we decided to do something to ‘show the world’ that rote learning is widely prevalent and ineffective. So we devised questions that test understanding (for example in a concept like density or algebra) and first showed it to teachers. Teachers would say ‘Of course, my students can answer this.’ Then we would ask students (sometimes in front of teachers) and often less than 20-30% of students would answer what seem to be very easy questions. This was how ASSET was born, and it is now done by almost 4 lakh students every year from schools in every corner of the country. It provides schools diagnostic as well as benchmarking feedback showing them where they stand.

In 2006, a study done by EI with support from Wipro was featured as the cover story of India Today.

Working with governments and partners: Slowly based on requests of governments and funding agencies (sometimes based on requests from parents whose students had done ASSET) we started offering similar services to governments and have worked with Harvard University, the World Bank, UNICEF and many others. Recently a large 18-state assessment of student learning was completed with funding support from Google. Senior EI members have also been members of a number of MHRD committees on topics related to assessment and learning.

Mindspark: Mindspark is an ICT-based learning programme developed by EI based on actual student assessment data. It is a questions-based adaptive learning programme. This means that the system provides inputs to each child based on his or her actual learning level (not just the class he/she is in). This has potential not only in private schools but also government schools where it is common for some students in grade 5 to be at the grade 2 level, while others are at grade 3 level.

Overall learnings: 1. Always questioning the givens, do not do something merely because everybody does it. This is not just in professional life, but in important personal decisions like marriage, etc. also.

2. Any success we obtain is due to the support of hundreds of people around us. These include family members and team members. Personally I feel grateful to many, many such people.

3. What can you be best in the world at? If our mantra is to add value to today’s world, we have to be best in the world at something – both individually and as a company – the journey is always worth it!

4. Focus on doing your best, do not focus too much on the consequences: Sounds like the Gita, but a mantra needed to run a company! We do not have our success or failure in our hands, only our efforts.

Sridhar Rajagopalan is the Managing Director of Educational Initiatives Pvt Ltd. (EI) which he started in 2001 along with some IIMA colleagues. EI works deeply in the area of student learning and assessment through its products Mindspark and ASSET and sees technology as an important tool for attaining social transformation through an educational transformation that will see every child ‘learning with understanding’.

digital LEARNING

april 2010

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