 Welcome to a brand new episode of Mirana Dialogues with me Vinay Tiwari in association with exchange for media and I'm absolutely delighted and happy to have a guest today who I am possibly the most excited to speak to. You know we've spoken to many sectors in the past but this particular sector has been in the news. You can't miss this industry and you can't miss the company he represents. Welcome to Ateed Mehta, our vice president and head of marketing for Baiju's. It's a name that possibly everybody in India currently now knows and if for some reason you haven't heard of it before just you just need to switch on a television match and you'll find that name and place it across every single Indian predictors jerseys as well and I'll speak a thing or two about Ateed later on but coming to the more important questions Ateed. You know in the previous episodes we've spoken to a few industry captains who belong to sectors which possibly had a very difficult last year. I mean you know there was there was the pain of the pandemic and of course the lockdown and of course the changing consumer pattern behavior that their industry suffered but as the stars aligned the way things panned out there was one sector which possibly became India's brightest and the biggest sunrise in the sector which is the ed tech sector the sector that you you know you guys started off you know even before the pandemic started and I'm sure that your experience with the pandemic was very different from the way say in a sector like the auto or some of the other service industries panned out. How has your pandemic been and I'm asking this not just from the negativity of the pandemic but also in terms of the way the industry has panned out and the acceptability that the last year's experience forced people to do. Also for first and foremost thank you very very much for having me do this conversation with you and I. Coming to your question while none of us as individuals wanted the last 12 months what we went through but from a business perspective it couldn't have been better. Yeah since the schools were shut down and what we all realized is that in such a situation schools is the first thing to shut down and will be the last thing to open up and that's exactly where the things have panned out. We have not yet seen schools opening up and the academic year is expected to start in couple of months and we don't have clarity. There was a lot of anxiety amongst parents and they were fearing a learning loss they were fearing a year of learning going off their kids and the inflection point happened when people started downloading the app and what we saw in the last first five years of our journey we saw that happening in the last 12 months. So from that aspect exponential growth of the sector exponential growth of the adoption of online learning because there was no other option available and nobody wanted a learning loss. So in a way it wasn't the best way to achieve the numbers what we achieved but yeah we are happy that the digital ecosystem the digital learning piece caught the imagination of our nation and students started moving and learned digitally and did not end up losing a year or losing a learning year. Yeah absolutely I mean look I have always believed that edtech as a sector despite all that is talked about it is also fulfilling a big gap I mean and last year provided a gap which was also physical in nature I mean you just couldn't go to a classroom teachers couldn't access you know anything and obviously this gap got filled and I think the parents biggest worry is possibly a lack of continuity in education or even learning even if there was a break in a bit of continuity the learning curve shouldn't stop especially at younger ages which is an absolute must so absolutely I mean I completely agree with you that this was nobody would have wanted a pandemic but of course you guys came in and filled in a gap which possibly would not have happened if we did not have startups like the ones which you brought in industry but I and before I get down to the more sectoral specific questions I had a few curiosity based questions and I'm sure everybody has those questions which is this look I mean education per se has three or four different segments to it there is of course the primary education there is secondary there is higher and then there's of course the professional education which of these four sectors so to speak have been the biggest growth engines for you and also the most exciting for you I mean is there a differentiation in the way each one is growing or do you see a similarity in the patterns no certainly because if you if you break this down and if you look at the professional segment it's very important to understand that what is the addressable universe yeah there are x number of people or students who write a professional examination but when you look at primary and secondary education you have close to about 270 or million students in India and then if you look at pre-primary those consist of about three or four standards if I start with nursery which is lkg going up to standard two standard three that's about four to five years and then you have about seven to eight years which is your primary and secondary and then your professional examination so the middle two segment was where the maximum amount of students are there in terms of number of years yeah because the professional segment is too small in terms of number of addressable students so that saw the fastest growth if one has to break the education into four parts I see there is one other segment that exists in India that possibly the contrast is most intense in a country like India and that's the gap between the urban and the rural India and if I break down urban further maybe tire eight towns and then tire the entire city towns as well was there a bit of a differentiation there as well no even it was a big big pleasant surprise for all of us and what we also realized is that at least in tier one markets even in tier two markets at least the one top one percent two percent of schools adopted to digital learning because the students had the hardware available in terms of a mobile device or a laptop the schools created the lms system so for them it was not that bigger worry but the biggest segment to get hit because of schools being shut was the belly of the population and which is then scattered across the pop strata as far the the states are concerned so the majority of the growth happened from tier two tier three markets while growth also happened from tier one markets but the big big growth came from tier two tier three I see that's interesting and and and because you mentioned about how the biggest chunk of of course you know the students belong to the primary the secondary segment and of course the provincial segment is going to be the smallest pretty obviously let's spend a little time speaking about these two segments because that's also the segment that possibly concerns not just individuals but families I mean every family in India's biggest concern is of course the children's education and and each one is looking for its own way of making it better and better than the previous generation I mean I think all of us are products of our parents having sacrificed and invested a lot in us reaching where we have simply because they put education above everything else and that's the way India is but one specific point I wanted to ask you that ed tech as a sector pretty much is linked to how well the growth in the formal educational sector happens it goes together it one can't happen without the other the government's new education policy has put a target of 50% you know gross enrollment by I think another 10 years or so but clearly there's a lot of headroom in that you know in that sector I mean we still have a long way to go even to get children to come into the formal sector as well so in that sense does say a net tech major and a leading player possibly the biggest player right now you have in the world like by do you look at the formal education sector more closely on how that's growing because without that growing there will be some amount of standard growth for you absolutely absolutely there is no better place than a physical classroom for getting the right level of education and that needs to start that needs to grow and we need to have better schools in terms of infrastructure we need to have better connectivity because now everything is moving digital so school needs to create that ecosystem so yeah we closely follow everything in the offline world yeah it's very important that we also partner with the the educational boards to ensure that the right level of education is imparted to all the students who are part of the primary and secondary segment plus it's also very important that we feel that teachers this is the golden age of teachers yeah because if if we are not able to get the right quality of teachers the right pedagogy which the teachers provide then we will never become an educational powerhouse so everything now works in tandem now the digitization has happened as a as a country yeah people have experienced the online version of studying and nobody is saying that you need to replace a school and only study online this is a plus one because no student is alike yeah come home and learn through the digital content which is available will certainly help you conceptually clear your doubts so the online is now a plus one schools will start and we are hopeful and we are all looking forward to school starting and we are very very closely following the entire now the new school normal as we put in and see how the next three to five years shape up which we very strongly believe is going to be a blended learning approach I mean it's very apt that you mentioned things about how you know technology is playing a big part and of course the sometimes the inconsistent penetration of technology that India has it's a very diverse country you will have certain bandwidth issues in some cities maybe in some parts of the country you may even in cities there are some places where there may be an issue so I it's very interesting I just you know I wanted to understand your mind on a very specific issue that came to my mind when I was just reading up a little bit about how this industry is spanning out you know ironically when I was growing up and I was in school the first hint of a mass universal education platform a technology-based education system was actually the UGC countrywide classroom and I remember in 84-85 when actually nobody had heard of something like that Durdarshan used to put out this Mahar classroom during the afternoon so in that sense they understood the importance of putting out education in a more qualitative manner at a mass level and of course now with technology I mean of course there was no technology then but now but having said that the reason I brought up the UGC example is this even today for education to really I mean for you or any ed tech major to become a partner in the process of educating India it's very important that we keep looking at another segment that gets marginalized whenever something like e-learning comes in which is more over 500 million people who possibly still don't have access to smartphones they're still on 2G and this is the number the DRAI gives us do you believe that even for a country like Baiju which is investing heavily in of course making online education extremely popular there may be a cause to even consider say something like a television platform to address that 500 billion segment that will still take a few years to reach you know the optimum level of high tech phone access or gadget access no one can certainly look at a broadcast platform or like like television to impart education but the beauty of the business is that education is very customized and very personalized yeah if I am in a seven standard grade and you are in a seven standard grade I will understand and learn a subject faster or slower than you would yeah and then there are multiple subjects and multiple sort of grades so one can look at broadcasting education and which we tried doing it in our small way during the lockdown we started Baiju's classes and since there were no classes happening we had our own teachers India's best teachers on a scheduled basis so there was a weekly schedule there was a monthly schedule and sessions were scheduled and the students had to just log in but it still does not address the question in terms of connectivity in half of the country still not penetrated or there will be problems in having the right bandwidth to stream a video or to stream a session but yeah slowly and gradually it is moving that the best part is what we were three years ago and what we are right now and what we would be three years down the line it is growing at a very very fast rate so over a period of time the country should get connected and everybody will have access and that's exactly what we intend doing that reaching we want to democratize education we want to have education going to look and corner of the country and ensuring that every student in that age group gets the school level education so putting it on a television it's an option but we have yet not tried it I mean look I'm sure Baijus have already addressed this issue but for those who are not very familiar with how you approach this I have a very specific question look in India I mean I grew up in Lucknow for instance and of course you know in those days CVSC was not a very popular board now we had ISC and ICC which is also a more popular board in those towns and now you have different state boards also and each state in India varies in the way they teach in the way they expect and even in the way they mark and assess their students so there are very different expectations and I remember there are fables about how somebody would say oh you're from ex-state board it's so tough nobody gets more than 70% and another one say oh but you guys are really in India you get 90 the point I'm making is there is a differentiation in the way different boards operate now how does Baijus reconcile with that so that means there are almost 30-35 models of how teaching is done in different states and of course the different boards that exist I mean is there a how does you how do you work at the back end to handle something like that yeah so our educational content which we have created is mapped to 14 state boards and it's also mapped to CVSC and ICC so if you are for example a Maharashtra state board and you register yourself as Maharashtra state board the content which is then provided to you will be as per your Maharashtra state board curriculum and that's applicable across the other state boards ICSC and CVSC but beyond that if I have to teach you integers or if I have to teach you some concept in physics or science some boards might be having it in the second term some might be having in the first term some might be having in the next year that's the only significant difference but the concept of how to learn about integers or how to learn about Pythagoras theorem is going to be common it's just that the it's six months prior or it's six months later so it's just aligning the curriculum and creating content which talks to that relevant board so that that's already mapped in the paid version right one other question and I'm asking you to possibly reveal a trade secret maybe it's not a secret but I'm very curious to know because that answer will possibly help me understand how India is approaching a problem and where the problem is which is this is there a specific subject or a bunch of subjects where you've seen the maximum demand coming in because that will also tell you where the maximum gap is in terms of the quality of education I mean I for instance grew up in a city where mathematics is universally bad I mean we all kind of liked or disliked maths because our teachers were good or bad depending on which school you went to are there certain subjects that you have greater traction for or much greater traction for so over the years we had maths and science as our key subject delivery six eight months back we added social science which is history geography but if I have to look at the four subjects which we have certainly maths is the number one pain point both for students as well as for parents and we have all gone through that journey of trying to solve maths problems so maths is the number one piece but we also strongly believe that spoken English right yeah is also a concern because we were fortunate and our parents as you mentioned sent us to good schools and we ended up learning and talking and speaking in English but that might not be the case with majority of students across the country so English should also become the spoken English written English can also become a big big area of concentration but as of right now it's maths. Oh absolutely I mean I'm glad you thought of English because I remember you know English is up in small town India it's seen as an aspiration language it's also seen as a passport to success and I remember even in towns like Azhamburne for instance last time when we were there during elections every street in Azhamburne had four or five English speaking tutorial classes I mean of course the quality was you know a lot to be desired and I guess that's where you know things like Bayou's come in because that's more consistent and that's more qualitatively you know the QC of course is like you know million times better than what they are aspiring to be but yes I mean English definitely I would have assumed would be one of the big factors in India which brings me to the other question Adith that look I mean there has been obviously the along with technology and there's something that all of us you me all of us are possibly facing it there are issues and concerns that people are raised also about the especially the primary and secondary education level of the screen time that the children are having currently and how that is going to go up now one of the ways in which possibly the attic majors can work is also to look at encouraging children or parents to allow or to push children to get out there and play and that becomes an equal part of what you guys are pushing but you see that as something which should be part of the DNA and how things will move for the attic sector because these concerns will remain and there will be those medical science doctors or even experts who will keep raising these issues about increasing screen time for children because they deem to be harmful. No absolutely so those concerns from a parent perspective or from a school perspective will certainly remain but in today's day and age a kid is spending a reasonable amount of time on a digital device and the whole premise is that if I am spending that time learning something rather than spending that time playing a mobile game or watching content which at my age I'm not supposed to watch it yeah it's still a better situation yeah there are concerns but the the positives are outweighing the negatives in terms of digital screen time and what we realized is that the we have moved from a blackboard to a digital screen and that's going to stay yeah but if you are able if it's not about spending five six hours on online education content what one is asking for is spend about 20-25 minutes every day and if you do that it's not going to impact your eyes it's not going to impact anything else but yeah if you end up spending eight ten hours whether reading something on a digital screen or watching something or playing a game certainly content is not important then then the screen will will damage your eyes and everything else so half an hour in a day I think it's it's it's it's much much more more the value of the output is much much more than the impact that you see on yourself right I mean one interesting you know aspect that comes out of it India always had a very large tutors market and a lot of it was unorganized where you had a neighborhood you know tutor who would just cater to the neighborhood or you also had a little more organized business approach I mean I just acquired Akash which was quite a major acquisition and quite a headline grabbing event we've also had a unique country where you have towns which are almost tutorial towns you have Kota you have you know towns in Anzapadesh which virtually entirely revolve around you know tutorials and there is a certain amount of mechanical approach that has come into it it's almost like a factory where you know people are it's like another college where people are shoved in and you know and in Kota specifically we've seen the negative side of that as well I mean there are quite a lot of stories about how children students are going through enormous pressure the rate of suicide in Kota is actually higher than the other districts of Rajasthan and a lot of them are attributed to this coaching culture in many ways isn't Baiju then trying to just replace the informal tutorials tutor sector and I'm asking this question for a specific reason because till now parents were engaging tutors because it brought in a sense of time discipline and some kind of organized approach in a child's life that the tutor is going to come at four or you have to go at four so you're forced to do that so in that sense you're doing I mean Baiju's doing a great job by actually allowing a more qualitative tutor-based approach but the negative of that is that it takes away the structured mindset that some parents do have in terms of the discipline that they want the children to go through No it does it does and slowly and gradually that is also changing because what are we saying we are saying that online education Baiju's provides you conceptual clarity Baiju's will provide you movies like video which will help and if I'm explaining something in a very well produced two three minutes video with high level of animation and graphic and explain that entire piece you will start putting a schedule to yourself and you will not require somebody to push you for that four o'clock class or you know get the teacher in your house at four o'clock in the evening so it's all about making students fall in love with learning and we are doing that with conceptual concepts so if I explain you concepts which are conceptually staying with you for the longest time in a format which is very easy to understand and comprehend so will it change overnight no it will not change but are we seeing a sort of a trend where people are now going and creating their own schedules and don't require especially students don't require a push that please step out of the house and reach to your tuition classes for a particular slot so it's moving and it is moving in the right direction so do you think in the next five years or so we are actually now looking at a situation where you know with the rapid advancements in things like AI technology for instance education can actually get so personalized that it becomes a class really becomes specifically targeted at you I mean because I'm just assuming that with data investment technology AI will soon be able to actually almost predict patterns and figure out what a student wants what it doesn't want what he or she's weak and what is the pattern of the questions she's asking and so on and so forth and so are we looking at that situation where very soon you may have an absolutely customized product even if there are three children in the same family and using the same platform no it will in fact it's already started now I'll just give you an example yeah I'm taking a test on byjuice yeah and there are 20 questions I get 10 questions wrong I get 10 questions right those 10 questions I'll have to retake the test to move to the second segment the the second set of question which pops up to me are much of a much lower difficulty level even if I don't get 20 on 20 or 18 on 20 the difficulty level will come down but if I have answered and if I move to the next stage the level of difficulty goes up and that's the way the video plays out so that is hardcore machine has learned itself the algorithms are working and the more time spent the more usage data we get the system the the machine learning and the artificial intelligence behind that will become much much more stronger so yeah I wouldn't be surprised that if not five years but in couple of years it will become as customized and as personalized as one would want wow that sounds very very exciting I mean I mean some people might find it scary but I find it exciting because technology is something you can't stay away from it's part of our life and I guess everybody doesn't even realize how much technology plays a part in all our lives very exciting let me move away from a little bit of technicality and ask you a question which which interests me a lot personally tell me a little bit of the story I mean you've been one of the lead principal architects behind byjuice being the Indian cricket team sponsor and I'm a big fan of cricket so it's something that I follow very keenly tell me a little bit of the backstory why is it that I just thought that you know using say somebody like a Shahrukh Khan or a film star or or cricket was one way of actually ensuring that the world comes to know of something which is actually counterintuitive which is education because traditionally Indians don't put sports and education together. Yeah so Shahrukh was basically using a film celebrity a known name it was the decision was taken about five years ago for when we launched the business that time nobody knew us there was no online segment there was nothing like edtech so it was more about mass reach and at least getting us noticed and it's more it was in the discovery phase we wanted people to discover us and a celebrity from that aspect makes sense and we have continued and then every time when we went back the business was looking bigger stronger and we continued that but as for cricket is concerned what our philosophy is what we strongly believe is that for an overall education is not about the academics education is all about the the 360 development of a child yeah and what sports teaches you know nothing can teach you it will teach you teams team play it will teach you respect it will teach you discipline it will teach you hard work it will teach you success and it also teach you that after success how to be grounded so all those aspects is a sports aspect and if that's your filter number one the second filter is then which is the most prominent sports in the country but we didn't require any phd in marketing to answer that question so the choice became very very simple yeah and fortunately for us the the availability of the sponsorship was also critical because this is a single slot sponsorship it's not like I'm taking a a serious sponsorship there are eight or ten brands there is only one brand you are there or you're not there fortunately for us the timing worked out we wanted to we were scaling up big time and the belief was coming together that sports will play a equally big role in the overall development so all this put together it was very very simple answer that it has to be the Indian cricket team I'm glad it is because you know I mean if if cricket and films can can push people to you know imbibe a better way of getting educated why not I mean as I said you know when we were discussing earlier that even in the pulse polio program wherein government was struggling a bit in certain parts they ended up using a major celebrity a major film start to actually push people and it worked so so why not let me ask you something I mean of course the last one year has been very exciting and very very good from a business point of view by just but and if I if I have my data right we have about 10 million users currently right active registered users in the industry per se and I'm assuming it's about four and a half five billion worth of industry currently if my match is correct where do you see this going in the next say you know two years from now I don't want to make it a longer than two year period but do you see this is a conservative estimate or do you think that this can be maybe four times more or five times more in the next two years no so I think it's not 10 million yeah Baidu subscriber base yeah is about 80 million yeah oh I'm so sorry I meant 100 million and my apologies yes yeah so at an industry level as a segment it would be close to about 100 odd million while the total school going population if you look at IRS and all this industry India database it stacks up to about 260 to 70 million so technically we are only one third the penetration of online education is only one that's on number one point number two is the paid subscribers at an industry level on a hundred million base would be at about five and a half to six million so that means we have penetrated only five percent of the of the category that's there is a humongous headroom for growth and we believe that year on year this growth should be at an exponential level both at top of the funnel as well as more and more people taking the annual packages but you also see that this industry's for the next two years will really be about expanding customer base or it's also going to be about expanding into say newer areas for instance one new area that gets talked about is the online extracurricular world for instance not just the formal education is that something that you see also coming in and fueling the growth or will it be just a question of adding more numbers in terms of the headroom that you spoke of there will be a two-to-one approach you will certainly be looking at growing your top of the funnel adding more and more people to the larger kitty as well as having strong content pipeline having strong launches coming in so for example as I mentioned we launched social science yeah now we are launching social science across more grades and more boards so that's a that's a product thing we spoke about English and what has also happened is that parents are looking at creating or at least ensuring that the students get something beyond education so you have a lot of extracurricular coaching so there is online music happening online sports happening online coding happening online one-to-one maths happening so there is enough and more happening over and about education it's all happening in the online space and that continues so again so sports extracurricular and education if you look at it at a holistic view and if one goes through this journey we don't see a reason that that person will become a very very strong rounded personality as he goes into the professional journey as well as his professional career okay my final question to you Ateeth is again something linked to technology because this is industry that works with technology and that is pretty soon enough I mean we will have 5G coming in as well and that is going to change a lot of things as well obviously for the better I mean there are of course some sectors who may I mean the broadcast sector for instance has their own issues with you know some of the 5G proposals we have but for the consumer they couldn't have been a better time in terms of upgrading their technology so I'm assuming that once that comes in even the animation design and the quality of you know the transmission that currently exists or people can access currently is going to grow exponentially and and the good thing and I think the best thing that could have happened is India is also a very very strong base for animation design per se I mean we have very very skilled people who work on it world-class you know professionals who work on the industries I'm assuming the 5G is another thing that I do and the entire tech industry is looking at very very closely yes absolutely so see technology we will not be able to be stagnant on the technology front every year every month every minute there is a technology advancement happening but one is geared up one is preparing for it if 5G 5G technology is available we need to test it out everything will happen at the back end with our tech and the product team and whatever needs to be done to make the consumer experience better than what they are having the business is committed to do that with the sole objective that we will provide the right level of infrastructure with the right level of content with the right level of teaching pedagogy to make the consumer or the student journey much much better than what it was before right I wish we had more time and we could have continued forever but this is a very exciting conversation Ateed thank you so much for giving us insights on how Yju's works and of course how the whole tech sector is looking up and I'm sure that people are watching it but also be a little more educated about understanding the whole dynamics of how the tech industry is working and the need and the use for it because you know it's very easy to label any industry it with a broad paint brush I mean I think once you understand the specifics of it it becomes easier to imbibe and adapt to that so thank you very much it's a it's a great industry education something that we need in India much more than we have currently and I'm absolutely delighted to have you tonight thank you Ateed and thank you very very much very thank you very much for