 Very warm welcome to everyone to the Education Innovation Awards 2022, organized by Entrepreneur India. My name is Bhavna Bhatia and I shall be your host for the day. The Education Innovation Awards in its second virtual edition recognises people in and around education for outstanding contributions in transforming education through technology to enrich the lives of learners everywhere. The event is supported by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India and National Informatics Centre. The event is hosted by Entrepreneur India. We'd like to thank all our partners for their association and support. And also we'd request all our delegates to keep posting questions through the Q&A option. We will try and answer most of the questions by our esteemed speakers if time allows. Well with this, it is time for me to invite Ms Ritu Maria, Editor-in-Chief Entrepreneur, Media India and Asia Pacific and Franchise India to give the welcome note. Thank you Ms. Maria for joining us. Over to you. Thank you Bhavna and a very good morning to all of you. And I've only welcome everybody to the Education Innovation Conference and Awards here today. Certainly this is the first education gathering that is happening in the new year of 2022. And we only look forward to the industry being, you know, more, so the new things happening in the industry as we go ahead. So I think that the pandemic and particularly the national education policy that was announced in 2020 have what such far-reaching changes in the entire education sector. So particularly in the K-12 if we look at a 5 plus 3 plus 3 plus 4 structure and the role of regulators and how, you know, they are powerful and yet more meaningful they are becoming with the policy. It's only tells us in long term that they are far reaching changes that will happen in the education sector than ever before. But however, you know, if you look at a pandemic and the way we have moved to online education to hybrid education. We also get to notice that there are no common template has come into existence when we want to educate students remotely. You know, the point is that sometimes we're getting them back to the classroom sometimes we are trying to create a hybrid model sometimes we're going virtual only, or sometimes even both. So I think we are probably suffering from a classic dilemma of short term challenges but I think in the long term certainly the future for education sector is only beautiful and bright. Now understandably 2021 was a major learning curve for students parents and educators whenever when as teaching moved online, but I think the second wave and now of course the third wave has bought the efficacy of the use of online as a great tool for getting education. And I mean not just at the school level but probably higher education level and even the lifelong learning level. Now the question is really not about giving digital education which was perhaps the haunting question from 2015 to 2018 19 about the adoption of digital education I think that part has already got settled. But however what we need to be able to comprehend now is how effective we can make digital education. So the transformation for educational institutions from here on is not going to be an interim activity or not something that they will only do because it is good to have but it is important to have. And that is where I think a complete journey for educational or hybrid education will continue or begin to evolve. As we try to look at this medium of education or online medium of education as the right way or an integral way of education structure. Now what is the end goal of doing all of this the end goal really eventually boils down to the fact that we need a student was more empowered with not school or the screen, but rather as I said in a hybrid system of education. It also means that the education will need to ensure that more personalized learning is there to happen and I you know it's important. I think the education online education space has given us that power that we are able to give that personalized data based understanding of a student can be created and therefore the education and the things that he needs to learn can be crafted according to the particular needs rather than one education delivery template for all the students. I'm particularly very excited to see this happening where in you know where student will stand the course of his or her learning in times to come. Now, while this is the scene on the K 12 education scene. On the other hand, particularly on the higher higher education side, I feel that there will be systemic changes that will be seen as I like to call it the post secondary education and you know because it is. I think the student who has really rejected the in the last two years and probably that's going to be the way forward is the time in the place based education model and at the companies of course further have gone away ahead and they are creating low cost degrees delivering competency based education and also you know focusing on growing populations that are under represented in the entire education sector, and therefore offering pioneering subjects and certifications which earlier we never used to see in universities or higher educational institutes, and probably that's going to be the wave of the future as students want degrees that will give them jobs in current digital environments. So overall I think the education just doesn't end after the school or the college anymore in an era where of of tech disruption that we are sitting in now lifelong learning is really the way to be. And I think if we want to safeguard our jobs for the future or want to be future ready, then we have to imbibe our students self in us, all of us need to do it, and keep on continuously learning new things in order to be relevant to the professional professional industry to the work industry in times to come. So keeping I think this large education scenario, which is changing very fast in mind. I would welcome you today at the Indian Education congregation here and we have education leaders who are going to be speaking during the course of the day. And some of them have really done some pathbreaking work in the tech sector and they're going to be telling us as to what is the future of education sector. And, but, you know, in one sense I'm looking forward to this conference and the speakers, giving us, you know, their insights because we have speakers coming from both the words of education both from the public side as well as from the educational institution side and they would, I think, probably from what they say is where we're going to get the right idea about how they are rewriting the dynamic new world, which is heading towards and which we are all heading towards and of course there's also going to be the education innovation awards, wherein we will recognize some of the most forward thinking organizations in the education industry today. You know, there are multiple sessions for you to look forward to and the top leaders who would join us and share their insights. You know, if you have questions, please keep on posting on the chat box, please do not wait for the session to end as we would be, we would be having many sessions and we would be very, very punctual about the time since this is the education sector conference. So I would suggest whatever suggestions questions you have please keep on adding it in the chat box so that we're able to take it up with the panel as we go along this conference, particularly if you have any questions that you would like to ask me. I'm always available on LinkedIn kindly reach out to me over there also I'm looking forward to spending a wonderful day with all of you. Some very productive discussions and some, you know, ideas that will of course cater the future of education. So have a wonderful day ahead and certainly, as I said, we've just started in January 2022 and this fall, probably the discussions here today will charter the course of how the education sector will be in the years here, particularly for this year and the future years to come. Welcome once again. Thank you so much, Miss Maria, always an honor and pleasure hearing you. Well, ladies and gentlemen, with this it is now time to have the opening keynote by WAMC Krishna CEO and co-founder with Antu on the topic access connectivity and opportunities for students and at tech founders reflection on the passion for and readiness to enact digital transformation for learners amid uncertain times. Well, WAMC Krishna is a CEO and co-founder with Antu India's leading online tutoring company, which enables students to learn life with some of India's best curated teachers. WAMC, along with his friends now fellow co-founders, Pulkit Jain and Anant Rakesh had founded their first education venture called Luxure in 2006. Luxure was subsequently acquired by Empty Educator in 2012. Post the acquisition they founded with Antu, which has now emerged as India's leading interactive online tech player across K-12 and competitive test prep. Well, with this it is time now to bring WAMC Krishna on the screen. Hello everyone. I am WAMC CEO and co-founder of Edantu and it's great to be here talking to all you folks. Education and tech especially has gone through a massive, massive upsurge in the, especially in the last two years. Tech has been there for over a decade. We have been talking and implementing a lot of technological innovations around education technology. It started off with as early as when radios and televisions came about to as recent as when smart classes and all these new innovative stuff was being experimented in schools. But very honestly, I would say I really saw as an entrepreneur being in education for over 16 years. I saw the adoption of educational technology and tech for the consumer side, peaking out in the last three, four years and COVID has further accelerated it, even beyond proportions. So that's a great thing. And as an entrepreneur myself, I think it's a wonderful, wonderful time to be in this industry and doing some innovative work in the space. As with Antu, I remember clearly, we started with first live online class way back in 2014. And personally as an entrepreneur, nothing is more satiating and satisfying to see a category which, you know, when we created becoming mainstream. And now not just B2C private tech companies, but even schools and colleges all adopting and doing life classes during the COVID times. So those are the exciting stuff. But I'd say it's very, very, very early. Many people ask me this, like, you know, is this the peak of a tech and after COVID will it go down? Very honestly, guys, I can tell you that with stats first, even right now with all this stuff which we hear around a tech and a tech adoption. We all the online education companies combined and I can talk to you about the K-12 numbers. And I'm very sure that similar numbers would be post K-12 as well. But in K-12, out of the total available target group, which is around 80 to 90 million households who have access to internet, who can afford devices, who have an household income of, you know, of greater than an amount which provides this affordability. That 80 to 90 million households, the tech overall online education is probably somewhere on the, you know, middle single digit penetrations, right? And that's today. The total DG is actually even beyond that. There are around 8, 200 and 80 to 300 million kids households in India just in K-12, right? So if you look at from that perspective, online education and tech is so under penetrated, even as of today. And that I see is the massive opportunity and a place of innovation for all the tech companies, including with Antoine, all the other tech companies that there is almost 95% of the teachers still remains untapped, untimely treated. And that is where I see the next wave of innovations coming up, wherein you need to reduce the cost. You need to think about more innovative models because not all, you know, people would require same set of offerings, right? So offering innovations, prize innovations, model innovations, all of those things are something which you will see coming up in the next two to three years. So it's far from over. In fact, just got begun. And if, you know, if you look at Southeast Asia and the kind of tech penetrations there are, it's massive. It's higher 20% kind of a penetration ongoing. So India is an infancy. I think we are just got started. COVID has really gave us a big boost to the brand awareness of this category. But I think the job is way far ahead to like, you know, in front of us. I think all education companies and more education companies will see doing a lot of innovative stuff in this, right? That's on one. The second thing which for me personally, you know, is very exciting is to see the impact of education and tech, especially going into the tier two, tier three, tier four. That's fun. It's already there. It's already happening. But again, the impact purely because of the device affordability and internet penetration is still limited out there, right? And I think that is where the impact of tech is going to be more felt. Not saying that in metros and top 10, top 15, top 20 cities, it won't be there. It is there. But still fundamentally, you have an access there. If you go out, you still have teachers, you still have access to some good content. But in tier three, tier four locations, even if you are wanting to do this, or if you're ready to pay, even then you do not have access to good teachers, good content. And that is the next area where I see not just a massive penetration to happen, but also impact to be much more there as compared to probably the, you know, the metros in the top 10, 15 cities. So that's going to be a trend which we will see, right? And a sub trend of that would be more penetration into vernacular languages as a consequence of this. So largely today, even today, I would say tech, including with Anto is majorly focused on, you know, the top languages, like in the English and a few other top languages. I think vernacular is one big area where for a diverse country like India, you know, for education to happen at a last mile, we have to go there. And that is a second probably a wave where you will see a lot of, you know, innovations and product iterations to happen with respect to not just, you know, online education, but even in offline sort of setup. So that's the second way. The third wave, which I think is very interesting, and this is purely because of COVID, I would say, it was not big before that, but in COVID, I'm sure as all of us would have witnessed a lot of schools, a lot of colleges, a lot of formal educational institutions have been forced to adopt educational technologies. And even after COVID, I don't see that trend completely getting shut off. Because schools have experienced this, they have been exposed to this and a lot of innovative hybrid models will emerge. So that's the third wave, which I feel we will see in the next two to three years. Where in as the COVID receipts, it will not happen. Definitely schools, I think the students are going to go back to schools. There's no two ways around it. I get asked this question quite a lot that will, you know, will this thing continue to operate in a complete hybrid or online method for formal schools? It won't be at all, right? Because there are a lot of reasons behind it. Cognitive skills is not the only thing that schools are responsible to generate. There are a lot of non-cognitive skills also, which comes from social interactions, games, arts, a bunch of stuff. What I have seen personally is online education are great in doing cognitive skill development stuff, which is, you know, clearly around academics and related activity. But when it comes to social, physical, those things will still require that offline play. And that is where schools, that's the responsibility of schools in which ways and that is where they do a good job as well. And that yet cannot be, you know, completely replaced by online. So hence it would happen that the students will go back, but will it be 100%? That is something which is very interesting and needs to be seen. Because what I believe is because they are now exposed to educational technologies, there will be a lot of innovative solutions wherein let's say 60% or 70% in school and 30% even at home. There is some stuff going on, homeworks, other engagement activities. Because the schools are now exposed to these tools, I really see them continuing to use this to making their own systems and processes more efficient and, you know, at the end of the day, adding more value for the student. The framework to think about it, at least in my opinion, is to keep the student in the center and think about what is best for him or her and designing solutions around that. And that is something to watch out for. One of the classical problems and the challenges which I see a lot of educational companies and offline companies making is imposing solutions on a child, right? I think technology is just an enabler. What is important is to think student first, you know, in all these circumstances and situations and design a solution around students. It can have an online component, it can have an offline component, it can have a technology component, it cannot have a technology component, doesn't matter. But the framework which ultimately succeeds and does great is having the student in the center and designing stuff around it. So I can give you an example on this way back in 2014 when Vedanto was starting its, like, you know, doing life classes. I mean, we were laughed about on this because at that time, almost everyone was doing asynchronous recorded video content delivery. And the reason why we did this is not because we wanted to do it. It's just because having been in education and being a teacher before that for eight, nine years, another founders realized that if you want to create a pure online scalable solution which creates learning outcomes. Yeah, it has to be an interactivity led, right? It has to be an interaction. And that is why the solution was designed. So I am a big believer of this and my also suggestion to all the future edupreneurs, both online and offline, is to have that framework in mind and that always serves them. It was lovely interacting with you all and all the best for all your future endeavors. Thanks a lot. Well, thank you so much Mr. Krishna on that wonderful note. All right, so ladies and gentlemen, we do have our next session all set. We're looking at talking about the school ed tech solving India's core education problem. We are joined by Sumit Mehta, CU and co-founder lead. Sumit being the co-founder and chief executive officer of the India's foremost player in school ed tech category with a network of 1.2 million plus students across 3000 schools and adding 300 schools a month currently. But with this, I'd like to welcome Sumit on the platform. Thank you, Sumit, for joining us with this, the stage and screen is all yours over to you. Thanks, Bhavna. Are you able to hear me clearly? Yes, we can. All right. This is great to be here on in the education innovation summit. Let me just share a few slides and talk about how school ed tech is solving India's core education problems. Could you enable screen sharing? Can we get the team to please enable the screen sharing for Mr. Mehta? Yes, so look, I guess a lot of investment and interest has happened over the last few years on ed tech in India. And interestingly, a lot of that interest has gone towards what I call consumer ed tech, which is supplemental education. And the whole idea there has been to circumvent schools and go directly to students with the belief that it's almost impossible to transform schools in India because it is a 70, 80 year old problem. A lot of people have tried it in the past and a new wave seems to assume that through tuition, homework, help and test prep, we will be able to give our students a leg up. And our thought and our learning has been that that's important but not sufficient because while what it does is it gives students what I call a bandaid and sometimes a leg up in terms of clearing the important entrance exams. It doesn't solve the core fundamental problem in India, which is that India has one of the largest school going student population in the world. I sometimes joke that if Indian school going students were a country by themselves, they'll be the fifth largest country in the world. That's how big the Indian school going population is. But the challenge is that the quality of schooling which is made available to these 270 million students is not up to the mark. And the opportunity which is the other side of the coin is that these students end up spending 6 to 7 hours in school every day. And I sometimes wonder that if we are able to ensure that those 7 hours, those 6 hours are spent meaningfully in learning the essential mindsets, habits and life skills that students require to succeed in life. The potential and the possibility of what we can do for the country is sometimes mind numbing. And that's why I feel that school at Tech has the potential to really make a big difference in core education. Like I said, despite 270 million kids going to school, a lot of innovation that we've heard about and celebrated has happened outside of schools and colleges. And a lot of the companies we've celebrated in the past have actually worked outside the institutes, whether it is higher education or even K12. And the intent really is that we improve students' skills in math science, get them to do better in CET, JEE, NEET and that's enough. But however, when you look at a lot of these solutions, the thing that has bothered us in the past is that a lot of focus is on user adoption, engagement. The typical tech measures, basically measuring how many students are free and how many students are paid, how much time do they spend on the app, are they coming back and attending the next session. So adoption, retention, engagement, these are the metrics that are typically both monitored and shared. And learning outcomes seem to be conspicuous by their absence. And that surprises me because what we have learned over the last 10-15 years is that in education and in tech, Saraswati precedes Lakshmi. And what I mean by that is quite a profound insight that just like when you go to a restaurant, ultimately if the food is not good, you're not going to come back again. Similarly, in education, if the learning outcomes are not there because that's the core purpose of education. If students are not learning, they're not developing the mindsets and skills that they require to succeed in life, they will not pay fee, they will not come back. And if that doesn't happen, the company's commercial success is going to be under question and if that's under question, then investments and valuations will be under question. So all the Lakshmi metrics of commercial success always follow the Saraswati metrics of learning outcomes in education. And in the short term, through glitz and glamour and publicity, one might be able to get good adoption. But in the long term, ultimately parents and students have to see a meaningful difference in their learning ability, in their learning outcomes for sustained success in tech. And if this has to happen, ultimately schools are critical because like I mentioned earlier, a child spends six hours in a school every day. And a school is not only a place for academic learning, it is a place for whole child development. So the research on this is pretty solid that for a child to achieve success in life, board exam results are important but not sufficient. A child requires what we now call 21st century skills, whether it is collaboration, critical thinking, communication and even mindsets of grit and perseverance. This is what helps a person succeed in life. And school is the perfect laboratory, crucible, whatever you want to call it, to develop these skills and mindsets. And these skills and mindsets cannot be done through a one-hour online class. And that's why it is critical that we transform our schools because the potential that a school has to develop a whole child to do deep impact cannot be matched by supplemental education. That's why school at Tech. Now there are three important words in school at Tech. There is school, there is ed and there is Tech. And sometimes in Tech, we tend to just focus on the Tech part, but we need to understand that in this term school at Tech, there are three real important entities. So let's just explore them one by one on why they are important because that will be really helpful for us to appreciate why school at Tech is important to solve India's core education problem. So let's take school first. The real challenge that Indian schools have, you know, and India has the largest number of schools in the world in 1.5 million. Even if I leave out the million government schools, the half a million private schools in the country. Unfortunately, the challenge in these schools is that most of them are afflicted by poor teacher skill. India conducts like a national teacher eligibility test every year and you'll be surprised or maybe not surprised to know that close to 90-95% of our teachers fail this test. You know, we all know the quality of our B.A. program which prepares teachers for teaching and the quality of that B.A. program is neither consistently high across all B.A. institutes and the B.A. program also, you know, for the longest time has not been upgraded. So what it leaves us with is that majority of our students are faced with a teacher in the class who herself requires major upskilling, major empowerment. You know, they're stuck with 19th century tools and they're preparing kids for the 21st century and that equation in itself is a recipe for disaster. And therefore schools require major reimagination in terms of how do they upgrade teacher skills because that one lever can actually make a massive difference in how schools can fulfill the need of preparing students for tomorrow. The second challenge is that, you know, because India has so many schools, the consequence of it is that each school is small enough and therefore does not have the capacity for innovation. If you travel to schools in tier two, tier three, tier four towns, you will see that they're basically a combination of different lecture halls connected through a corridor. And, you know, the school learning that you and I went through 30 years back and our parents went through 70 years back. A lot has not changed. A teacher is still standing in front of the blackboard and, you know, giving a 40-minute lecture and then turning her back towards the students and writing answers of the book back questions on the blackboard. And students simply copy those question answers in their notebook and they commit it to memory and when there is exam time, they reproduce those answers. And this charade of learning continues, you know, year on year till the student either hits the board exam or a job interview. And that's when they realize that the 10 or 13 years of schooling that they went through really hasn't amounted to much because they haven't developed core concepts. They haven't developed core mindsets and skills. And fundamentally, you know, school is different from a consumer attack where it is about beaming a class. It's a complex ecosystem. You know, there are multiple stakeholders. There's the teacher, the principal, the school owner, parent, student. And there are different layers of operations, you know, the teaching learning process, the school operations process, the parent engagement process. So it's not an easy one to solve, but unless we reimagine how schools are going to run in the country, we will not be able to truly unlock the potential of our country. So that's the opportunity and that's the challenge in schools. Now let's talk about the the Ed part. Ed requires major transformation. The data is out there for all of us to see. We all know that the one time India participated in PISA, it ranked 72 out of 73. It was a matter of national embarrassment and we stopped participating as if, you know, closing our eyes to the problem will make the problem go away. Well, it doesn't. Asad does this assessment every year to show that grade 5 students who can do grade 3 math are only 28%. Grade 5 students who can read grade 3 English are only 50%. And I'm only talking about academic learning outcomes. You know, readiness for life is actually absent from most of our schools and curriculum. So what we teach and how we teach requires major transformation in our schools. So that's the Ed part. And lastly, if I talk about tech, tech has been largely absent from our schools, you know, apart from the hardware based smart class solution, schools have been resistant to resistance to tech because the teacher skill has been poor to accept it. And, you know, school themselves have been small enough to absorb any major technological innovation. So they're stuck with traditional teacher training, traditional books, lecture based teaching, lecture halls for classrooms. So not much seems to have changed in the classroom of a traditional school in the last 60, 70 years. And that's why if you put this thing together, you know, school requiring the imagination, education requiring transformation and tech requiring adoption. That's what we basically brought together as lead. The hard thing was that, you know, if you have to really transform schools, you have to start with the outcome. A lot of solutions in the past have been focused on inputs saying, you know, you implement a smart class, you implement a computer lab, you implement this curriculum, and things will happen. But fundamentally, the school processes, the teaching learning processes would not change. The school tech approach that lead has been driving across the country is giving a mastery guarantee for schools saying, if you implement the system, the learning outcomes in your school will increase by 20 to 25% in a proven manner. And then whatever is required to be done to achieve that, the system will take care of it. Now, that's a pretty radical proposition, never been done before in B2B school at Tech across the world. But thankfully, you know, we've been able to deliver on it. When students come to a lead powered school, they come with 1.7 years of gap in their English levels, which is the data that you see on the left part of your screen. And then across 24 months, we are able to reduce that 1.7 years gap to zero, because ELGA, which is the English Language and General Awareness Program that lead implements, is a skill-based program which accelerates students' English skills and gets them to grade level. Now, when you're going to an English medium school, this is amazing because now you're able to read math and science and social studies in the medium of your instruction. And that's why ELGA reducing the English skill gap in 24 months is magical for schools. Now, if you look at the graph on the right-hand side, when we start working with the school, a typical class composition is that only 29% of students are above the 70% mastery mark. And in 6 to 9 months, we're able to radically change the classroom composition by having 70% of students above the 70% mastery mark. And that has a big impact in the classroom engagement, classroom participation, because now a majority of the people are above the 70% mastery mark. Now, these are outcomes that we have consistently been able to deliver across schools. And my reason for sharing this is that if we are able to really transform student learning in schools, then we're talking about real transformation. And this happens on the back of teacher transformation. The solution that LEED provides to teachers really upgrades their skills. So, you know, if you look at when the teachers begin teaching the LEED system, their rating in terms of performance is like a 2 out of 5. But one year post-LEED, they move to 4 out of 5, which is again amazing for a school because ultimately we all know that the quality of learning cannot exceed the quality of teaching. So therefore empowerment of teachers is very important. And this reflection features feedback which continues to improve. So, fundamentally what we've been able to implement is an integrated system which has a comprehensive curriculum stack, a pedagogy which is tailored for high learning outcomes, a tech system which is enabled for scale, an excellent outcome for all stakeholders. And if we do that, I mean, it's not done for one, two, three schools. This is a system now which is working at scale. And a scale that is unprecedented, you know, 5,000 partner schools, 2 million students across 500 cities. And my hope is that if we are able to have more innovation flow to school transformation because there are one and a half million schools in this country, half a million private schools, we are still serving only 1%. You know, in the long term, we want to be able to serve 20%, 60,000 schools in the country. But there is more innovation required to ensure that our schools become better because if our schools become better, then our students will become better and nothing can be better for the future of our country than transforming schools. And that's why I continue to say that, you know, school tech is critical to improve the core education in the country. That's what I wanted to share, Bhavna. I would love to take any questions from the audience if there are. Sure. So, Sumit, just in an interest of time, we've got a certain set of awards. We'd love to, you know, have your presence with. So could we get on to that because our winners and everybody are waiting in the back. I'm happy to go by what you would like to do, Bhavna. Sure. Thank you, Sumit. So, ladies and gentlemen, with this, we're going to be starting with the first set of awards. So I'll just request the team to kindly do the preset now on the screen. And let's see who the winners are as in interest of time. Let's get on to that right now. So, ladies and gentlemen, as you can see on the screen, we've got our first category, which is display, which is ed tech deployment of the K-12. And that goes to lead school. So congratulations, Sumit. Heartiest congratulations. We'd love to hear your, you know, acceptance speech on that. Over to you. Thanks, Bhavna. Like I said, I think this is really good, strong validation for, you know, what I was saying, which is that ultimately, if India has to do well, its schools have to become better. And, you know, we are really, really glad and privileged to play a small part in that. So I would dedicate it to our school partners, students and teachers who given it their best in delivering strong outcomes for students across the country. Absolutely. Congratulations to you and your team, Sumit. And let's move on with this to our next category, our next preset planes. So ladies and gentlemen, the best classroom tech solution of the year hardware and that goes to Glovis Infocom Limited. Congratulations to the entire team of Glovis Infocom Limited. And could we request our dignitary to kindly join us on the screen, which is Kiran Dam, who's a CEO. Kiran Dam, congratulations to you and your team with this. We request your acceptance, please. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this award because awards are a great motivation. We are trying to do our bit. So a big thanks to the jury first and foremost for giving us this honor. And we humbly accept this award. And last year we did 10,000 smart classroom solutions, Pan India, which included the rural areas as well, because our strength is that we want to make technology accessible to one and all. And we are trying to make that accessible. We are trying to transform the classroom environments into a highly immersive and engaging atmosphere. So thank you so much for this honor. Absolutely. Congratulations on that. Well, ladies and gentlemen, with this we move on to the next category. The next preset, please. Well, the best e-learning blended or flip solution goes to Birohan. Congratulations to the entire team out there. And may I request Nalin Saluja, founder and CEO of Birohan, to kindly join us on the screen now. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for the award. I think it's an amazing validation again from entrepreneur India to recognize the work that Birohan's been doing. And I think along the lines of what Sumit was saying earlier, Birohan is the in-institute solution for the higher education industry and we could not agree more on the importance of live interactions in the classroom and the importance of a teacher. That's what we are leveraging to transform higher education, focusing on the healthcare sector to begin with. And thank you so much for the award. Thank you. And congratulations to the team out there. Well, ladies and gentlemen, now with this, let's move on to the next one, which is emerging technology solution. And that goes to Edu Brisk. So congratulations to Edu Brisk on that. And may I request Saju Arvind, CEO of Edu Brisk to kindly join us now. Thank you. Good morning to all. I'd like to thank Edu Brisk and the members of the jury for giving us this honor. As one of the speakers told today, it is not an easy journey to bring in technology innovation into schools to make the schools invest their time, energy, money in upskilling the teachers to get into analytics-based interventions, ICTs, then data science and neuroscience elements. So I would like to specially thank the partner schools across seven states and India and Middle East, who not only joined us early on, but gave us the constant feedback to make it suit to a school environment. So once again, thank you. And I would like to thank the member team of Edu Brisk team who believed in this vision and mission and to make quality education affordable, equitable. Thank you. Right. Congratulations on that. Well, with this for the final award in this set, let's find it out. The new age institutions providing online degree and that goes to SVJN School of Global Management. With this, I'd now like to invite Dr. Christopher Abraham, CEO and head of Dubai campus to kindly join us. Thank you very much for this honor. Yes. Yes. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. We can. Thank you so much for this honor, humbled, of course, and privileged to receive this on behalf of the school. I think for the last 18 years, we've actually started making a lot of innovations. Much before COVID, we had invested in technology and online. In fact, the cutting edge technology called ELO, which I think has been recognized, talks about a very key element in online learning, which is engaged learning. So how do you use technology to engage students? I think it's the number one prerogative. So we are honored to receive this award. And we want to thank the jury and of course, entrepreneur magazine for recognizing us and certainly would go a long way in making many more milestones. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Dr. Christopher. With this, Mr. Mehta, just your words towards the end of our first set of awardees whom you witness. Any thoughts on that, please? I think, like I said, education requires as much innovation as it can get. And I'm really glad to see so many companies attacking the challenge of improving schools and higher ed institutions. I continue to believe that we have to make our institutions stronger and better. Whether it is schools, colleges and universities and the more innovation that flows there, the better it is for the country. So all the best to all the winners. This was really exciting. And let's continue doing the good work. Absolutely. Thank you, Ms. Mario. Your thoughts, please? I just want to congratulate all the winners. And I think some wonderful work happening in the ethics space. And thank you, Sunita, for joining us and congratulations on your award too. Thank you. And congratulations to everyone now. Well, ladies and gentlemen, with this, it is time now to move on to our next discussion. Once again, congratulations to all the winners. And thank you, Sunita, for joining us. Well, with this, ladies and gentlemen, it is time now to move on to our next panel, which is building an effective learning ecosystem scalability and personalization. How to balance the two, making education non-linear and flexible. Well, with this, I'd like to welcome to the session, first up, our moderator, who's going to be Ms. Rithu Mario, editor-in-chief entrepreneur media, India and Asia Pacific and franchise India, who's going to be the session chair and the moderator of this panel discussion. We're joined by our speakers, Akshaya Chathamweli, CEO and co-founder, leverage edu, Hari Krishnan Nair, co-founder, create learning, Ashutosh Kumar, CEO and co-founder, testbook.com, Akshaya Munchal, founder and CEO, hero, a wide, we've got Falhoon Kumpali, the co-founder, upgrade and Kashi Abdelal, co-founder and CEO of SimplyLearn. Well, with this, I'd like to humbly welcome all our panelists on the stage and screen. And Ms. Mario, over to you to take on the live rain and take forward the discussion. Thank you, Bhavna. And what a stellar panel to be speaking to here today on this Monday morning. So thank you very much for joining us, everyone. Of course, given the diversity of this panel, I would like to keep our discussion focused more on higher education and lifelong learning and therefore would request all our audience to stick to questions which would pertain to that and also to the kind of work that is being done by our panelists. So indeed, higher education, I think, saw its very first changes probably somewhere in the 19th and 20th century when, you know, industrial revolution was in place and, you know, the industries at that point of time that were emerging required a certain kind of talent pool for the businesses that were being built. And I think the next set of revolution has come now, which is in the 21st century, when higher education is again being transformed and this time it is to serve the needs of a global digital knowledge economy. And now, given that scenario, I'm going to ask my panelists to share their thoughts. I'm going to start with Akshay Chathruvedi first. Akshay, most welcome to the panel. Hi, Ritu. Hi. So, you know, something I'd like to know from you is that how do you think COVID has changed the approach towards higher education for Gen Z, really in the COVID times? What has changed permanently from their perspective? What are their current priorities today as students when they look at wanting to take higher education and they come to your platform for it? So, let's start with that and maybe, you know, I'll pop some more questions to you. Sure, Ritu. No, thank you. Thank you so much for having me here today and great to be on stage with such a distinguished panel. I'll keep it brief. At Leverage2, we are a study abroad platform. We help about close to 20... We helped 23,000 students last year head abroad and largely I think one... I would essentially flip your question as well. I'll talk about what changed and what did not change as well. What changed was that students are now way more outcome focused than they were before, right? There's a very clear understanding that I am not pursuing higher education to collect a damn degree or certificate in my hand. I needed to be more outcome focused. I needed to essentially have employability at the end of it. I'm pursuing higher education because I want to read somewhere. So in fact, on our platform, we have about close to 400-plus counselors as well and our counselors now essentially tell students that boss, if you're putting 15 lakh rupees, 20 lakh rupees, 25 lakh rupees to go to one of these countries, be it Australia or UK or Canada or the US, these are the four different kinds of jobs that peers like yours have already got in the last one or two years. This is what you can also get. You'll get financing. And this is what you can actually see yourself making by the end of two or three years. So I think it's very, very important that we as education companies, we as I would say, I call ourselves a mobility company, not just another tech company, because essentially helping people kind of be mobile between destination A to B. So I think that the understanding about being more outcome centric and also having a more proactive approach to jobs than a reactive approach. I think in India traditionally we have had a more reactive approach where we have the college view placement. You just have to kind of wake up, put on a tie, sit for interviews, all of that. I think that to a more proactive approach kind of looking for jobs and keeping yourself ready also for all of those things. I think that is one big change that I've seen. One big change that I've not seen is that which a lot of people thought would happen but has not happened is that people still prefer campuses. There is a very small section of people who kind of move the online and say that okay, online is a better way for me to kind of go about these things. But for a mass long tail, for a large majority of, when I say Bharat, or when I say Bharat I also mean to say the large majority of other emerging countries in South Asia, South Asia, large parts of Africa, they still wanted campus experience. They want to be at a campus. They want to essentially be in a classroom. They want to talk to the professor after the class finishes out. They want to do those part time jobs. And I think that is something that in 2020 when we launched a lot of these online programs through Leverager 2 for a lot of these universities, about 100 plus universities, that was an absolutely damn show. And as soon as kind of those visas started picking up and the flight started and we started okay, bang, this is 300% up back again. So I think that is something that we also realize and we've witnessed that people do not care as much about just sitting in front of a screen and learning a lecture. I think that can happen on YouTube and a lot of other platforms as well. But a select set of people who want to kind of go to college, they look at both of those things in campus experience. And then essentially, of course, want to have a more reactive approach to jobs and a more clear understanding that what I really want out of college and that outcome based counseling should be given to me on day one so that I can take a better decision. And do you think that, I mean, given what you just said that people want to, students want to go back to campuses, do you think that the future of higher education is hybrid? Of course, of course. So I think it's a mix of both online and offline. Even these people who have essentially gone abroad, they still have a couple of classes which happen online. So I think it's largely 20, 25 online and 75 offline. And there's a very clear understanding on what can be offline and what can be online. For example, if an assistant teacher is essentially coming in and solving doubts for you, that can be online. You can essentially do it in your room, you can do it in your library, you can essentially do it in a remote way sitting out of your home country. But if it's a classroom experience where there are a lot of practical teaching happening where you would require essentially to spend time with the, I would say, focus groups, you would essentially spend time on multiple projects where it is a more experiential learning in some sense. I think there you would need an offline experience and network always and always and always from something which is online. Also I'll kind of just add to that. Learning is one part of it. The other part also is that, like I said, what I'm really kind of going to get out of it. So if I'm going to that country and if I really want a job, if I want to move to UK, if I want to move to Australia, if I want to move to the US or Canada, I want to do a couple of those part-time jobs or internships or kind of assimilate myself into that economy, talk to people, local people in that country in that city, all of those things as well. And hence it makes more sense for me to be on campus to be doing other things as well, not just the learning part. But I think that is how we have essentially at least witnessed things move in the last two years. Sure. Thanks, Akshay. I'm going to come back to you. In the meantime, I'm going to Hari. So Hari, welcome to the Education Innovation Summit today. So at great learning today, when the focus is moving from higher education, particularly from your perspective at great learning, when the focus is moving from higher learning to lifelong learning, the idea is to really be students. Everybody needs to be a student at every point of time. So what are the trends that you have noticed particularly with the demographics of the student enrollment that you are seeing at great learning? And particularly with the collaboration models that you have with universities for executive programs. So do you see them being more hybrid or do you see them being more online going forward? Sure. First of all, thanks, Brithu, and the team for inviting people to this panel discussion. And it's good to see a lot of known faces and friends from the sector. So big hello, shout out to all of you there. I haven't seen you guys for a couple of years, otherwise you would see each other on conferences like these. But I hope you're all doing well. Coming back to your question, Brithu, so broadly the question is two parts, right? One is in terms of the trends, learning and if we just suppose that with demographics. And the second part is what's the future when it comes to executive and lifelong learning? Is it online or is it hybrid and so on? So let me take the first part. So we've now at great learning, we've been in this field of lifelong learning and executive education for more than eight years. And of course, the advent of COVID accelerated the curve in terms of interest that we saw from the market in terms of people wanting to learn. The demographic change that we saw was that pre-COVID, mostly, most of our learners used to be in the 25 to 35 year each practice. That's where we would get most of our learners for our various programs. But over the last two years, we have seen that while that segment has grown, but we have also seen a lot of adoption in the other two segments, which is let's say 22 to 25, which is what we call as early career professionals, people who are in there, let's say just into their first job or in the early years of their first job. And even people with more than let's say 15 years of experience. Of course, their learning requirements are very different. The kind of programs that they're looking for, the kind of learning outcomes that they want are all very different, but there is adoption. So what has really happened here in the last two years is that everyone today or most of the knowledge professionals, most of the working professionals, realize that this career journey that they are on is a continuous journey where they have to continuously upgrade their skills. So there is no stoppage to learn. The skills that you have today may become less relevant or definitely will become less relevant in let's say four or five years and you'll have to go back and supplement those skills and acquire either adjacent skills or higher order skills and so on. So it's a continuous journey and more and more professionals realize that and that's why they are coming back to options like great learning and everyone else, looking to see what else should they be learning. And as I mentioned earlier, in this journey of theirs, what is also very clear is that as they gain more and more experience in the industry, the learning outcomes that they are looking for are very different and let me just quickly kind of give an example for that. So what happens is that when somebody is early in their career, like an early career professional, their first and foremost objective is getting a better job. They are looking to switch their job or switch their career. So everything that they want to learn is from that perspective that if I do this, if I do this program, if I acquire this skill set, will I get a different job? Will I be more employable and so on? But as you gain more experience in the industry with, let's say 10 years plus of experience and so on, those learners when they come to us, what we realize that their primary motivation is not about a new job. It is about how can they be better at their current job? They see all of these opportunities within their organizations where there are new projects getting implemented or new teams getting built. So there are these opportunities for them to grow, take more leadership roles, but for that they need to be more skilled and that is their perspective. So obviously what you learn and how you learn and the skills that you develop also change and that's the basis with which we also create programs. So the 50 plus programs that we have at different universities, each of those cater to a different learning outcome or different learning objective and primarily catering to a different audience, depending upon what they're looking for. To your second question or the second part of your question with you about in this area of lifelong learning and executive education, is the future online or hybrid? See here, unlike full-time education, here the challenge is that time is always a constraint amongst all other constraints that working professionals have. So they have to take out time to study or to learn in conjunction with the time that they have to take out for their professionals and personal lives. So that is where online kind of trumps over. So which is why we are seeing a massive adoption. I believe we will continue to see an adoption when it comes to online learning. Having said that, there is always an audience and especially senior professionals who do value classroom learning as well. So post COVID in what we really foresee is that of course most of the market would be going online but there will be that niche segment, a premium segment that would want to learn in a classroom environment but limited exposure which means like maybe 25% or 30% of the learning happens in classroom or weekends and this happens online and there will be an audience that would value that kind of learning as well. Sure, thanks a lot Hari. I'm going to come back to you again. I'm going to come to Ashutosh now. Ashutosh at Testbook, you know you focused always more on government jobs and they have always been I would say in one sense very highly sought after in India but I think since 2014 when Testbook was incepted to now what kind of change have you seen in terms of people's outlook for taking government jobs? I mean given the fact that there's so much happening in the economy at the same time. So do you think that overall with the government's notion towards privatization and you know they're taking a big step towards it and you know they're looking at a lot of temp positions rather than more permanent positions in the larger state protocols. Do you feel that there is some change that is happening on the government job side which are trends that you observed? First of all, thanks Ritu and the interpreting team for having me here. Ritu, I guess there is a, let's say the reverse side of the thing which is happening in India. So when the pandemic happened and then there was a lot of job cutting was happening in different organizations we will got more awareness, more aware about the government job opportunities because if you look at on average people take three to four years to take a government job even if they just have to pass the attitude test. So the question is why take three to four years to sort of crack the government job? It's finally because of the huge competition there are more than 50 million students fighting for a really 5.6 lakh jobs, right? But the biggest motivation or intent for the users there is the job security. So they know that if they are able to crack a government job for next 10, 35 years no one is going to throw them out from that particular organization and that you cannot take it off. Even though the privatization is happening but it's still there are a lot of opportunities to take it which is in the very different organizations and every year a lot of election movement is happening in India a lot of new vacations are coming up. So we have not seen such trend people getting skeptical about the government job when they're getting more like the mainstream towards the government job because the COVID has something where they have been able to see how the private companies have reacted over. So we know that in the COVID days almost two years people were fired people were jobless but people who were working in the government job were sort of getting the salaries and they were able to sort of manage the entire family and everything. So that piece is not there but definitely from a user perspective in this COVID era there has been a huge you can say a shift in the behavioral change in terms of online versus offline. So when we started with who I remember that time when we used to talk about that you know he placed the offline question so people used to laugh at us and then that was not possible and then from the user perspective that the main behavior that we were able to see that they want just the assessment piece on online that said the exam had moved online but when the geo came when the smartphone became cheaper and during the COVID day when they were able to sort of see that they're now able to access a good top quality teacher sitting at their home at least one fifth of the price that's where like say and then in terms of outcome the platform that has to be able to sort of prove that like say even if like say you are going through online programming like say 4 to 5 months of the program your score has been improving by let's say 40% 50% as a very clear clear membership happening and seeing in the dashboard. Those are the things which actually build a strong trust among the users around the online product and the services which is available but even if there is a huge things have got a lot of things happening from privatization etc. but we have not seen any such like say the scaredness or something from the among the users so far. I think the love of government jobs in India it's so high that the market would never probably change too much. Thank you Ashutosh. I'm going to switch to Akshay now. So Akshay I know at Hero Wired you're doing some great work in terms of helping the tech talent needs to get developed and you know particularly in current situation when digitization is the order of the day that we are so short of tech talent in this country that everybody is feeling the heat not just the tech company everybody who is also looking for some kind of digital transformation to happen in their organizations. So you know how are you looking to close the gap so from that perspective are you working with NASCOM or some other bodies to see how this gap could be closed and also you know any kind of hybrid initiatives or virtual only initiatives that you're taking to see that this gap is closed faster for India. Great question Thanks for having me on the panel. Let me give a perspective on where the skill gap is coming from. I've been on both sides you know I've run an university as well running now Hero Wired. If you look at India as a country there's a huge employability paradox as per government's own reports anywhere between 70 to 75% of engineers are unemployable. There was a survey which Fikki and Mackenzie did years ago which pegged the number way higher. They were talking about upwards of 90% So on one hand you have a problem in the engineering institution. Now I'll talk about engineering largely because that's a large recruiter for companies. There's a huge problem on the engineering side. At the same time you look at demand for tech talent. Most companies where the new age old age manufacturing services are unable to fill the tech demand. Now we need to break the probability paradox otherwise what's going to happen is we continue having graduates come out for not getting commensurate jobs and what Hero Wired is really trying to do is how do you be a bridge between the two? There's a problem at its root. Once people graduate they join companies, yeah you still need to train them, upskill them. That's a continuous learning process. There's something which Hari also mentioned about demand in industries changing so quickly that people in companies also need continuous learning. At the same time by working in colleges, universities we are trying to train people even before they graduate so that at least the input which comes into the corporate world is far more suited and if you look at global data while in India if you talk about the government figure which I shared 70-75% of people are unemployable, the moment you take the figure from China or US or Thailand there's a huge difference there they talk about sub 20-25% of engineering being unemployable. What is really happening is now it's a very complex problem to solve because I also run a university it's not that colleges or universities don't know what is happening. Most colleges and universities know that here are the skills we need to train our learners on but there are challenges to that I don't know if you're aware UGC last year came out with a new ruling that for universities we can only hire non-PhDs to teach earlier we could hire non-PhDs but we could not promote them they had to remain assistant professor 1 AP1 throughout their journey now you can't even recruit non-PhDs so if I have to train somebody in some of the new skills you know talk about AI, ML, data science blockchain, crypto India doesn't produce enough PhDs in these areas all of these areas PhDs were not offered in this area until about 10-15 years ago so where do education institutes find talent to train in such areas so that's a genuine problem there on the education institutes side there is shortage of talent especially in these areas which I spoke about you're competing in the industry if you have somebody who's run a PhD ML would they work for an education institute or would they work for one of the big tech firms so you have a challenge there of lack of trained manpower secondly education institutions the way they run it takes time to introduce anything new so that is really what Hero Wide is trying to do we are trying to take some of our programs offer them in colleges and universities so that by the time the learner graduates he or she is adequately trained for what the industry wants sure thanks in fact we have a question also on the same lines do you think that Indian state-owned universities are really equipped for hybrid tech capabilities particularly with the professors being recruited in some other era how do you think there's sort of going to be part of the time machine I think it's a great question but most institutions didn't have a choice you were really forced into it whether you were a state university or you were a private university or a college or a school there was no choice so what most universities did was they ran boot camp for their faculty how do you familiarize yourself with Zoom or Google Meet or some other learning platforms so most state universities also have gone through that is that a preferred mode of teaching is a different question altogether if I'm a traditional teacher I'm used to walking in the class looking at the learners writing on the board here people have learners all over the country they could have bad internet connection don't have access to good laptop or desktop so they have far more challenges than just saying that our faculty equipped but it's a problem on both sides I totally agree with you but I'm going to come back to you as more questions are popping in but I'm going to jump to Falgun and Falgun we've been seeing upgrade almost all the time on TV so great work and you know I think keep up the good word out there but you know overall what are you seeing the change what kind of changes are you really seeing in the higher education sector with the advent of online education what kind of ROI in online education is something that students look for when they opt for a hybrid or an online degree and you know one area I feel that might become the contention of future is the price was that is likely to start once we are really out of the pandemic zone at least to some extent you know how do you think that the online degrees are going to be at par in terms of pricing with the price that is going to be charged by universities or even Ivy League colleges how are the parities going to come forward in the times to come thanks for the pleasure to be here and hi to the rest of the panel nice seeing you all again to start off I think there are multiple elements in the question that you are so I will start with what are the changes that we expect to see and what are the trends that we are seeing the first is obviously everybody talked about hybrid learning in some form or another and I think all universities have started to embark on that journey because they were forced to we thought that look it is going to happen over a 10 year horizon where universities will start doing online and hybrid but Covid has accelerated that process and I think universities have been forced to do it students have been forced to do it parents have been forced to accept it and I think we have seen massive strides in that and I think that will continue while I think a binary outcome of fully online students hybrid is going to serve the purpose in some form or way for a much larger set of students and that's where we are working very closely with universities to see how we can help them accelerate this hybrid journey in order to deliver strong outcomes for students so that the experience is not compromised outcomes both in terms of learning outcomes and in terms of career outcomes for students so that I think is going to be a massive trend for the next couple of years where we all work with established universities to see how we can create an ecosystem and infrastructure which is extremely strong in the hybrid space to deliver the same kind of experience and outcomes the second key trend that we see is global and I think education for the longest time has been a cottage industry with local universities having local catchments and while that is still true but I think we see that changing massively especially while we work with multiple Indian universities we are trying to see how we can get them into very interesting markets like Bangladesh Southeast Asia, Africa, Middle East where our universities can start building acceptance and credibility and similarly the other way around where I spent almost three months in the US in 2021 and a month in UK and I see that a lot of these international universities have now started to focus on the opportunity of international markets not just for attracting students on campus but also delivering online and creating an impact in these markets so you will see a lot of global universities with very strong supply of strong value propositions and programs with aggressive pricing in markets like India Southeast Asia, Africa etc and that I think goes both ways Indian universities have the opportunity to grow global and global universities will come to India and some of these other markets and I think that competition will play itself out and it's going to be exciting for all of us now finally on your point of price wars I personally do not believe that there are going to be any price wars I personally believe that in education especially in higher education the single most important thing is as I said the outcomes that you can deliver to students both learning outcomes and career outcomes and in the long run we are able to do that consistently the university or one of us I think is going to establish our strong signal for the student to communicate to a potential employer to communicate to society to say that look I am great at what I do if I have done something in data science from this university or this particular partner you can take it for granted almost that I am a great data scientist so that kind of signal and that kind of consistent delivery of outcomes is going to be very important for all of us and that's where all of us are putting in a lot of work and in education as I said more than price it's always about ROI so when we launched the first program at up grad 7 years back we launched a a PG program in data science with trip lighting Bangalore it was fully online 9 months and it was priced at 2 lakhs and this was 2015 every single person I spoke to said you are out of your mind because nobody is going to pay 2 lakhs for an online program but that has changed we have over time over the last 7 years I think increased the price of the program to 3, 3 and a half lakh now and it has consistently been only a function of the value we are able to deliver to the student if you are not able to do that then obviously there will be pricing issues and all of that but even at that point of time and even today what I tell my team is that if somebody is telling you that look this program is too expensive for me but if that same student today gets an admission letter from an IIT asking him to pay 3 lakhs or from a Harvard asking him to pay 2 crores they will pay it without blinking an eye but they think 3 lakh up-grad program is expensive which just means that they think that we are not delivering the value or there is no ROI in this and that is work for us to do so as long as all of us are able to focus on delivering that value and ROI I don't think is going to at least for me I hope it doesn't go into a place where it becomes all about pricing I hope it goes into a place where it becomes all about the value that we are able to add where we are able to deliver first sure you are right absolutely and I think probably the online campus recruitment would also probably play a very big role in times to come and the kind of and I mean for what is always work big for campuses to get established over these long journey of years is that what kind of recruitment and what kind of package was offered to a student who was coming out of there and I think eventually we will see that in the online campuses as well you know as we go ahead I'm going to come to you Kashyap so you obviously have a global presence it's simply learn and you know so you know if you have to look you've obviously been observing startups both not just in India but also outside India particularly edtech has been a revolution that is happening globally so you know what are the learnings that you have taken from global edtech startups and what changes are happening in that part in different parts of the world which I think Indians can learn from and I'd also like to ask you a financial question which I've refrained myself from now though I should be asking into this panel is do you think I mean you know we've seen so many IPOs happening all over the place for startups do you think edtech also needs to step forward and start doing IPOs and if at all it's a good idea to do IPOs outside India maybe in the New York Stock Exchange or some other part of the world Thanks Aitu I'd like to be part of this panel and a great group to brainstorm and discuss with so it's really good being here I think let me take the question in two parts I'll answer the question on IPO first and then maybe get to what are the observations on the international market my feeling is more that IPO is a matter of time I think a lot of companies on this panel itself are all thinking about it planning for it in fact if I think back two, three years back I and a few friends we used to have a lot of discussion that there is so much of private equity funding on the consumer internet side in general why are none of those companies listing and lot of it was to do with listing rules in India the requirements that a company needs to meet to basically list on the public markets but I think a lot of that is changing we've started seeing the huge rate of listings with Micah, ATM and Zomato and so on I don't see this stopping it's a great trend for the country and I definitely see that the tech sector will join the trend it's a matter of time maybe like three to four years hopefully there should be multiple IPOs whether in the Indian stock exchange or NASDAQ I think that time will tell that's more a financial decision for most companies to figure out I think coming back to the first question globally what are the trends that we see on the tech side there are I would say two major trends and I would basically make these observations in two buckets one is the skilling space that professionals looking to acquire certain skill sets and what exactly are they looking for and what's driving the market and the second one is more on the higher ed and university side than what are the trends that we are noticing one on the skilling side I think historically one of the things that has happened is both the side people once they do their graduation or post graduation and join a particular career track there is a tendency to not switch over too much because there is the entire thought process of some costing that I've spent five years in a particular area if I'm in sales then I've done sales and if I move to some other profession or some other role then I will not get credit for my experience but one of the things that the entire the access to information is driving is both the side people are very very aware on what are the trends in the market so if there are certain skill sets which are in huge demand if they are seeing salary differentials they are getting to see that if two people started with a similar salary package and seven years down the line depending on the domain which is doing much better there is a huge differential that starts forming people are actually a lot more open to actually taking things in their own hands building the skill set that is needed and switching careers so we see that as a huge trend globally that basically people are very clear saying that what do I want to do for the next ten years I might have done something for the last five years that's fine if I'm doing really well and if I've got a path in front of me then I'll continue doing that but we see huge demand on the skilling side with people looking to acquire skill sets that are going to accelerate the next phase of the journey so automatically it drives more and more research around digital skilling, new edge tech areas like blockchain, AI machine learning and so on and that's one huge trend which is only accelerating so I think that's one thing that we are noticing speeding up the second thing is again I think a lot of people spoke on the panel about outcomes we see very very strong focus on outcomes, people are not looking at learning for the sake of it when it comes to a new skill set and therefore they are looking for programs that can actually deliver learning and career outcomes and they are ready to pay a premium for it so one of the big changes that we've seen over the last five, seven years is that probably if I were to think about 2013, 2014, 2015 time frame people would be more focused on looking for e-learning programs where they can learn on their own look at a few videos dabble in a little bit of stuff thought process was still that if I'm in a job then my company should train me right but now if I look at last three years there is a very clear focus that I need to take charge of my career growth if there is a skill set that can make a difference let me look at a program that really delivers value what can give me hands on knowledge what can give me the right certification the right degree or the right kind of experience which then I can translate into career growth effectively so a lot of people are looking at education more as an investment increasingly more as an investment rather than as a cost and that's making a huge difference in the direction in which the market is in so I think these are couple of trends which are playing out and most companies are trying to adjust their portfolio of products to tap into what the consumer is looking for on the higher side and on the university side one of the very strong trends that I see is that with the advent of technology, tech, online learning, blended learning whichever model you talk about it is translating into you know leader takes a larger share of the market of a direction so for example earlier the entire thought process was more this that if I'm staying in a particular place I would have maybe 5-7 universities in that catchment which I'm considering and I'll probably enroll for one of them however increasingly the question that students are asking themselves is that if I can do an online program or a blended program with the best university out there why would I settle for whatever is closest to my hometown for my home so I'm considering this entire trend that earlier capacity was a huge constraint let's say an IIT would be able to take in 500 people and that's it so if you don't make it it's over but with the entire online road even if you don't get into the primary program by a premium institution you can get into some of their online programs, some of their certificate programs and stuff like that and a lot of people actually carry a lot of weightage for that that I would rather do that rather than going to a tier 3 college and basically do a program from there so we definitely see this also being a trend towards greater consolidation and stronger brands winning in the market compared to a broadly geographic spread of horizontal tech institutions I think that's a very strong trend that we see globally not just in India-U.S but in most parts of the world sure I'm so sorry to cut you in but we're really extending on time and we have a section of awards which we have to do before our next speaker, Professor Anil joins us he's already in the back end so I'd really request all our imminent panelists to please stick around for a couple more minutes I know you all have a heavy schedule ahead of all of you but just a couple of minutes to encourage all our winners so just allow us a minute while we get the preset done, Miss Mara we're just going to get the preset done for this section and let's roll it could we have the preset please for the next set of awards being displayed so ladies and gentlemen the best test solution of the year and that goes to text book congratulations could I request Ashutosh Kavarasi who is the founder to kindly join us hey hi everyone and thanks thanks to the India team and all the green members and as all the earlier the body was saying it's always a validation and a pleasure to sort of receive those awards and each and every one in the team puts a lot of hard work day and night they don't care about it and then the last one year we got almost like 95-96 lakhs new students coming on the platform and then the kind of impact that we were able to create is super massive and we focused on the tier 2, tier 3, tier 4 audience that's where the craze of the government job is actually and then it was asking right so there's a shift there's no shift at all and that's one of the values so thank you everyone thanks a lot and thanks to my thanks to our students as well congratulations well with this let's go on to the next preset please well the ed tech start-up of the year and that goes to our Brad well congratulations to the entire team well we did have our speaker Falgun who joined us so congratulations to Falgun and the team well let's move on and find out the next winner please the best skill solution platform and that goes to simply learn ask for our request see you on tv or simply learn to finally join us thanks thanks Ritu, Babna and team I think it's a pleasure to get this award and again validation of some of the work we are doing I think personally one of the things that I'm super passionate about is more the stage of India's growth journey I think India will need 10-20 million people skilled in programming and data digital skills in general over the next 5-7 years and really super excited to play a part in making sure that that talent is ready for the economy absolutely thank you and congratulations with this the last two awards in this preset could we have them please well the best online personalized learning program that that goes to hero wired congratulations to the entire team and could be request Akshay Munja will see you and founder to kindly join us Akshay perfect thank you so much extremely humble to receive the award for a young company like ours it means a lot the team has worked tremendously hard over the last two years to get us here and we feel very fortunate and blessed to be a part of this mission to help improve overall the quality of the Indian education thank you right congratulations and with this the final award in this preset please well the best online skills provider of the year and that goes to great learning congratulations to the team of great learning well requesting Hari Krishna and I co-founder to kindly join us hi hi thank you thank you for this recognition absolutely humbled and thrilled to receive it I think the clinic really belongs to the entire team the faculty and all the students all the learners who believe in us just as a closing thought I think you know the opportunity and challenge ahead of not just great learning but all the companies on this panel and the companies in the panel before it's so immense that I'm very confident that you know everybody here has a role to play in changing how education becomes more impactful and more transformative in the years to come and I think that is truly the exciting part about this journey thank you thanks again thank you and congratulations Miss Mara are your words of congratulations to all the winners we move to the next section please I think sitting over here we probably have the future the educator providers I remember there was a time when we used to celebrate our universities and I think it's just a matter of time maybe an year or so when we will equally so celebrate our tech companies also for the kind of education that they are delivering to students and as an outcome of that education that they're receiving from their tech companies they're able to find their place in the job market so I think congratulations to all the winners and to all of you for doing this wonderful work and I think you are the future universities of India in terms of the delivery of education that you are doing you know for some of you who can stay back we have a professor Anil Sahasra from AICTE who's going to be speaking next and I know there's just been a new order from AICTE that they're planning to detach tech startups from the higher tech space with universities as the new order so you know it would be really great to question him about it and to know more about it but thank you very much for joining us today I just had an amazing time with all of you and learning from all of you thank you very much absolutely thank you and with this we do really like to thank all of our panelists and thank you thank you so ladies and gentlemen it is now time for a little extended on time but we try and cover up on the billion dollar question are the rising evaluations of ed tech startups sustainable for this we're joined by professor Anil Chairman all India Council of technical education Professor Anil has held several important academic research and administrative positions at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Tata Consulting Engineers, Northeast Regional Institute of Science and Technology, Ibnagar and IIT Guwahati as a Director of College of Engineering Pune since 2006 on a deputation from IIT Guwahati prior to joining as AICT Chairman but with this I'd really like to welcome all the students from Professor Anil to join us thank you Professor Anil over to you great to have you thank you so may I speak now yes please over to you thank you very much for this particular keynote we're addressing especially the billion dollar question are the rising evaluations of ed to companies startup sustainable I think they have proved their worth they have already been evaluated as billion dollars once and many more will come and the very fact that five of them were awarded just now whether it is textbook upgrades simply learn hero wired and great learning they are all part of our initiative of what is known as NEAT National Educational Alliance for Technology where AI based learning of various subjects have been incorporated by AICT more than two years ago and the third version is ongoing and many more companies will be joining the bad bad end so the importance of tech companies edu tech companies who are able to give skills for our students as an educational feature beyond the education is going to be very very valuable from two perspectives one is employability the second one is entrepreneurial ability and therefore the value of the tech company is not going to diminish there will be valuation it will always have pluses and minus and depends on how many more will join there will be takeovers of companies by another company and so on so forth so valuations will continue to grow doubt about that with population of the size of 135 pro of which the young population which is interested in employability and entrepreneurship rising and our own vision of increasing the gross enrollment ratio in higher education from present level of 27% to 50% we cannot wish away the importance of the edu tech companies in the beginning you also said the AICT and UGC have got a new notification which came up and we need to discern between what has been stated and what is going to be allowed and not allowed the universities are the ones who are entitled to offer programs which lead to degrees and diplomas post degree degrees and post graduate diplomas they are all approved by a process of regulation be it by UGC or by AICT and in the new national education agency when a single regulatory body comes up called as higher education commission of India one of the verticals will be national higher education regulatory council which will continue to do the task of what the AICT or UGC is doing so there will be regulation which will be in place and institutions or universities who are going to be set up new ones or the existing ones will continue to be regulated by some kind of a mechanism however the institutions like startup companies if they also form what is known as section 8 companies and then apply them for giving education maybe PGDM program MBA, MCR they are most welcome but if it is a profit making company formally today education sector does not allow profit entity to view formal degrees but certification programs they are most welcome add on programs most welcome in fact the whole idea of the NEET portal which AICT and Ministry of Education developed was for this very purpose education which is important from the colleges and universities will create citizens of tomorrow with a background which will be helpful in their lifetime but when it comes to employability at times what is relevant to the industry at the current point in time is not taken care of and that is why there is a value addition which happens through such kind of skilling programs it is not just when they are in the colleges and universities but even post their graduation when they are employed they are doing a particular type of a job because of the change in technology which often comes in and today we talk about emerging technologies as artificial intelligence internet of things machine learning, robotics, 3D printing augmented reality virtual reality, cloud computing cyber security, blockchain data science these are all areas which are very important from Anand you are muted requesting to please unmute so sorry about that I don't know someone muted me No worries we will get the team to not do that because someone else was speaking that's why everyone was muted for me So sorry about that So I was referring to the role of adutec companies vis-a-vis the formal colleges and universities the programs which are approved by the regulatory bodies be it AICT and UGC in terms of permitting a program to be run is the responsibility of the university the adtech companies can provide support in terms of technology platforms for creating content which is more interesting by using augmented reality virtual reality or data science in order to make sure that the students are learning outcomes which are going to be achieved out of the education that is being imparted so there is a place for adutec companies for skilling I was talking about not only skilling when students are in the universities and colleges but also post their graduation when they enter into the job market and if they are employed by X company if they want to shift to a Y company which is doing some other activity naturally the skilling which a candidate had earned during graduation and during the job of 5-10 years of experience may not be sufficient so there is upskilling, re-skilling which is required not only when someone is shifting from one company to the other but also within the same company because the job profile has changed you will have more of IOT, more of AI more of machine learning all of that when it gets embedded and cyber security, cloud computing I have told about various new emerging areas these are all called as emerging areas but they are no more emerging areas they have entered the market there may be new things which will come up which we call in the future of learning and in that case unless a student one who is life long learner does not continue to learn I don't think he will fit into the industry at all and therefore there is a great deal of work that is required to be done not only by universities and giving online programs but also by ATEC companies in order to give the latest in technology that is happening in the industry world to the students or to the employees who are already working and that's why the valuation of these companies will continue to rise there is no doubt about it with such a huge population and India being a software giant in some way or the other all these ATEC companies who have been creating products which can be and which are many of them AI based, you test a student in terms of the learning that she has already done and for learning a particular course additional material that is required how do you provide that for learning and the path taken by different students in an ATEC platform could be different someone who has a better learning which is a pre-learning already done may do the course at a much shorter duration while someone who has much less knowledge about that course may have to do a lot of pre-learning and then come into the program and this portal or this educational technology platform will provide an opportunity to make a student learn all that what is required as a prerequisite and then move forward taking a little longer time than the rest of the people so all these are very valuable things which are happening in the industry especially a do take industry but only thing which the warning issued by both AI city UGCs don't take the mantle of giving an MBA on your own without having an approval for doing so and going as a franchisee of a existing university is also not permissible if you want to enter the market of giving MBAs and MCAs or even whatever degrees, online degrees you come to the regulatory process get approved and then run it there is no problem over drive for that one profit entity is not allowed therefore you will have to create a section 8 company and then have another arm of your company this can go on as a certification program certification does not require any approval but when it comes to offering a degree post graduate degree or a post graduate diploma or a diploma there is a regulation in country and it has to be followed that is all what we wanted to say through the circular which has been released or the advertisement which has been released but the value of the products of this nature can be seen from the number of companies which are on boarded on to AICT and Ministry of Education portal called NEET itself shows there are more than now hundred products on boarded more than 50 odd companies who have put their products online on to the platform and what we have stated here is for every four students who buy the product you have to give one free seat which as a government body we want our sections of the society who cannot afford even that small fee of 5000, 8000, which these companies charge for individuals we would like to get those free seats to be distributed to weaker sections of the society be it SEST, OBC or economically weaker sections of the society from the general category as well and that is where we stand now there are other activities where a tech companies have a great role to play different universities who are giving online program or ODL program may not have a robust learning management system government has itself created a MOOC platform called SOEM which has four quadrants one quadrant is for delivery of lectures in the form of video lectures the second quadrant is additional reading material provided as PDF files or additional videos from other sources which are in the open source market and the third one is the discussion forum where students can interact with each other with the faculty who is coordinating the course and the fourth window there is that of examination that means be it sessions examination or final examination or the quizzes assignments given and then evaluation of the student at the end of the program and then give the credit or grade for the students who do it. Something similar in the private sector also anyone can create a portal and any university may use either the SOEM portal or may use some other portal which is created by an adute company or for creating an excellent content which is very interesting if some kind of augmented reality virtual reality is to be made use of or a lot of animation is to be made use of and there are a lot of software which are available both ones which are in the free domain that means open source as well as there are those which are from a particular company which is to be paid money for license and then do it. If the adute companies help faculty of the universities to create a content with lot of simulation which makes the class interesting they are most welcome. This is the role that adute companies are required to play in collaboration with the universities but not give their own degrees by themselves without having the approval. I think I have made this much more clearer than what people were thinking and some of the aspects of education in terms of creating values the morals the integrity what we talk about in the even industry world we all see that they want people who work in teams they want people who manage the timelines they want people who have got the ability to be clear in their thinking in terms of critical thinking analytical ability and if to develop this if any type of certification is going to be provided by any adute company both as a part of the curriculum or outside the curriculum is welcome not the whole curriculum by itself otherwise what is the university for the university was established for giving degrees for creating the next generation of students who are ethical who are moral and if this itself is going to be defeated in the very process I think there is something missed out and that is what I want to substantiate on this particular platform and if there are any questions from any adute companies or from the organizers Bhavna or Ritu you are most welcome to ask me the questions Thank you very much Professor Anil it's always wonderful to have you here and talking to our audience and thank you very much for clarifying the circular that you spoke about we have a few questions that have come in there is one from Mahesh who says that what are the changes you would see in the non-technical undergraduate programs in India nowadays many online degree programs are available from international universities and how Indian universities can compete with those online degrees and how government can recognize these online undergraduate programs in India Online programs other than in some fields are already permitted by UGC and they have been offered by many universities I think about 56 of them are offering various programs in online mode where we do not have hardcore experiments or working by hands is required such programs are allowed even in some way some sort of indirectly related with engineering I am talking about for example MCA computer applications program or AI and data science program are also offered in an online mode whereas coming to hardcore engineering like civil engineering mechanical engineering electrical engineering where you have to work with actual equipment on the field and understand the nuances of that they are not allowed although we have a lot of virtual labs today existing which give a lot of input in terms of a lot of experiments simulation based experiments but ultimately in order to become a full-fledged engineer professional you need to work with the equipment by hand observe them operate them otherwise pilot who has been trained only on a simulator will you fly on that particular aircraft I hope so no one will agree to that unless he has some flying hours put in no one will be allowed to have the pilot license it is almost something similar to that same is the case with medical education unless someone has operated physically on a patient will have a degree which is offered purely on an online basis so same is the case with some other fields like physics or chemistry or pharmacy or architecture but many others like you know maybe economics maybe management maybe we have even sociology etc which can be easily offered in an online mode is being already permitted and it is only if we have to become competitive in the world market our faculty have to be trained that is another area which companies can take how the classes can be made interesting on an online mode that is a big challenge it is not easy in a classroom environment teaching learning is different and in an online mode keeping your attention span and then making you be present there physically as well as mentally is not an easy thing even in a normal classroom forget about in an online mode and therefore how do we make our teachers learn the art of doing this and that is where again there is a requirement both from the regulator from the facilitators from the adute companies and we welcome that actually there are a lot of teacher training programs which we have been doing in terms of Atal Academy from AICT something similar we would appreciate from even the companies so that our students whoever are learning they will be excited about learning from such online platforms so we are competing we are doing it in a big way and that is the task which we have already undertaken so we are running short of time but I think we will quickly take on one more question so Saurav Sinha is asking that you know there is some kind of career guidance which is needed to help eager students who want to pick up the right choice of online courses because the plethora of them being which are offered through online platforms so you know anything that AICT can do to facilitate it see already our SWIMP portal itself gives a lot of ideas about what are the type of courses which will be useful to you similarly the need platform which I have been referring quite often in this particular talk for 15 minutes is the one where all these are tested and please remember that this is a very rigorous process through which these are onboarded onto our platform first a blind review is done without knowing even the name of the company and the product it is only based on what is the outcome that is going to be achieved out of the product next one is whether it follows all the rules and regulations of the country in terms of laws is checked thirdly the actual product is tested rigorously and the return on investment of what money is being charged is it worth that is also seen and only then it is onboarded so I think you close your eyes and then join all those courses which have been taken on board on the need portal that itself is a possibility depending on what is your area of interest you must choose the right kind of a program sure sir I am going to now ask Bahamna to come and under your guidance we would like to present some ad take awards going forward so Bahamna if you can take the proceedings forward sure thank you so much Prof. Anil with this as Prof. Anil rightly said it is time for the awards let's get the presets rolled out and let's acknowledge the next winners well as you can see on the screen ladies and gentlemen the most breakthrough ad take start-up of the year goes to Sunstone at University congratulations to the entire team and may be request Ashish Mujal CEO and co-founder of Sunstone to kindly join us Hi Bahamna thank you so much for recognizing and giving this award to us and this is truly truly dedicated to the awesome team who has put their blood and sweat in reaching us where we have reached today and I just like to reiterate what Prof. Sahasthar said that this is a very large market and it's a big problem and there's a space for both ad take companies and the higher education institution and the universities and they can definitely work together and that's what we have been trying to do work together with the universities to provide them support wherever we can and with all the humility and humbleness we accept this award thank you so much for giving us this award thank you and congratulations well with this let's move on and find out the next winner as you can see on the screen best learning solution math science language drama and that goes to QMAC well congratulations to the entire team and may be request Manav Korma founder QMAC to kindly join us thank you Babna really thrilled to get this award at QMAC we think math is not just a subject you learn in school it's life skill critical for every child's success today and with QMAC we are on an ambitious mission to build the world's largest math brand in the global math market and I think with any such grand mission the real key to success is a great team which is true in our case as well so I'd love to dedicate this award to our stellar team and the thousands of QMAC teachers on our platform who have been announced with the pandemic to keep pushing us closer to our mission so thanks a lot and happy to get this recognition great congratulations on that well with this ladies and gentlemen it is time for our next award could we have the preset please yes the emerging classroom tech solution of the year and that goes to perceive education congratulations to the entire team and for this if I may request Uttam Kumar Pandey co-founder and CEO to kindly join us Hi Vahnaan thank you for the opportunity I would like to thank the jury the education innovation award team and this whole effort and the dedication put by our team to come up with a solution an extra solution which has a future vision of building a perceived educational verse for education teachers and students to work on right congratulations congratulations Uttam on that my ladies and gentlemen this is time for our next preset as you can see on the screen the best tech company of the year and that goes to Vedantu so congratulations to the entire team of Vedantu and let's move on and find out the next preset let's see who gets the next win the best online children's learning by a preschool and that goes to Europe it's a preschool congratulations to the entire team out there let's move on and find out the next winner emerging tech start-up of the year and that goes to Example well congratulations to the entire team and may I request Uttam Gandhi co-founder Example to kindly join us Mr. Gandhi if you're there would you like to join us on the screen so I believe Mr. Gandhi is not there in the back end right now we'll see if he can join us shortly for the next preset please I can just see Mr. Gandhi joining okay Mr. Gandhi congratulations hello hello thank you I would like to thank the jury for the award and it means a lot to us as a company because at end of the day these are the motivations that take us forward as a team and we look to provide as becoming the best employability solution we can be for the students and these awards will keep on motivating us thanks thanks a lot thank you and congratulations with the final two awards in this set let's roll out the next preset the best corporate training platform and that goes to Wiley Nex congratulations to the entire team and may we request Ritesh Kumar country lead to kindly join us can you see me unfortunately I'm not able to see you Ritesh Ms. Mario are you able to see him no right Ritesh is there some video issue out on your end I think I have switched on my video no worries Ritesh please go ahead we'd love to hear from you I think words go a long distance so please go ahead yeah sure so hello everyone so pleased to be receiving this award on behalf of Wiley Wiley India expanded its footprint in India's ethnic professional learning space with Wiley Nex just two years since launch we have certified and trained over 12,000 professionals in the back region in areas such as artificial intelligence machine learning and data analytics etc this award is a true recognition of our efforts we will continue to shape the workforce of the future with our efforts thank you very much for selecting Wiley Nex for this award thank you very much well congratulations on this and congratulations to your entire team at Wiley Nex ladies and gentlemen now with this it is time for our final award in this category shall we see all right the EdTech a deployment of the higher Ed and that goes to Meduacity congratulations to the entire team and for this award if I may request Gerald the CEO to kindly join us Gerald for giving us award and Ritu nice to get connected and Dr. Anil thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on AICT and the direction forward I would like to accept this award on behalf of all the healthcare professionals out there who are working today to make a difference to COVID over the last 18 months and also for dealing with Omicron as we face it every single day thank you well absolutely congratulations Gerald and Professor Anil you are the doctor of education let's put it that way so we'd love your words congratulations to all our winners please we just request to do congratulations to all the winners for these various categories I'm sure they will put in their best efforts to create employability skilling upskilling re-skilling of our entire workforce so that as a nation what we talk about New India which is emerging effectively contributing to that right absolutely Ms. Maro final words from you as well I think Anil sir has always been doing the pathpaking work of actually guiding the higher education industry to really go on and achieve the better echelons and what they are achieving and thank you very much sir for presiding these awards and actually motivating the award winners to continue to do the good work that they're doing and I think together you know with your knowledge of education that you have for higher education we should see it coming to fruition thank you very much for joining us today thank you thank you Ms. Maro thank you for our final and congratulations to all the winners thank you for joining so ladies and gentlemen now with this it is time to move on to our next panel discussion we hope you are having a great time it is time for edtech exit or in westmore factors driving the investments free in edtech a very intriguing topic for this this session is going to be moderated by Mr. Saurabh Kumar editor special projects on Saurabh India and joining Saurabh would be our panellist Ankur Vithal co-founder, inflection, point ventures, Manish Adwani associate vice president, elevation capital and Rishabh Malik venture partner, jungle ventures well with this I'd like to humbly welcome with a lot of enthusiasm all our panellists and Saurabh no one better than you to moderate this so please take it forth and have a great discussion thank you Bhavna thank you for the introduction and good afternoon everyone and welcome to this session in India as we know that every household the majority chunk of their income goes into children's education but quality education was something which was lacking and that is where the edtech companies have come in but more so importantly are the backers who provide funds to these companies to grow to the levels that they have grown we have seen in the past two years and we have three such backers here today thank you Ankur Manish and Rishabh for joining us today here so you know I'll just continue from where we left in the last session so Mr. Professor Anil Sarathukade was here and he talked about the notification that came that made these headlines to a different page of almost all newspapers so do you think that in any way is going to affect how edtechs have been valued or have been working till now in no order but Manish if I can start with you Ankur so I think as a evolution of any industry I think regulation the fact that regulation comes in normalizes that industry is only helpful and over time it brings in more legitimacy to the sector I think and also ensures that all stakeholders from students to even companies which are catering to these students improve and come up with more effective offerings right so I think net net it just shows that the industry is maturing it shows that the the government also is bringing in regulations to formalize and also support the sector in its own way and ensure that finally students also benefit from it so I think in the longest term it only helps ensure that there is more regularity that comes in the sector and I don't think it should impact valuations in any way it just ensures that like companies become more formal in which in the way they cater to these students okay Rishabh any thoughts and also giving the fact that maybe a lot of startups actually maybe they say that you know we are providing these degrees or maybe they would have done till now so do you think that that's going to change your perception in any way yeah I think I agree with you know everything Manish said I think long term the regulator getting more involved in the industry is a very good sign in some way it legitimizes the industry I do think in the short to medium term it causes a little bit of confusion between the founders between the investment fraternity around you know what the real lines of the regulation are and sometimes it takes a few cycles of that for that clarity to emerge to where the benefits move from short medium term to long term you know I think an example parallel example could be how we've seen you know regulation around e-commerce in India evolved right you've seen regulation come in all the way from regulation that impacts the investment fraternity in terms of foreign direct investment you see regulation that's coming in on how different sellers across different e-commerce platforms can and should be regulated and what they can and can't do and similarly on the customer side so you know I think it's very positive I don't think it should change that interaction between founders and investors in terms of how they pitch how businesses are evaluated and downstream valuations so but yeah it is going to take a few cycles between the private and public sector before they can flesh these out to where everyone has clarity of thought around it and do you think these cycles how long will these cycles be because that really affects the companies in the interim when you know you haven't really reached to a conclusion so regulations here and there of course they dismantle the kind of the growth trajectory that a company actually has a certain for it's very difficult to predict how long these cycles will be because there's an interplay between two very very diverse fraternities right which is the entrepreneur and startup fraternity as well as the regulator I think it just comes down to how much the regulator wants to prioritize this and in terms of fleshing it out I again I think that having been an entrepreneur myself in my past life I think it should not impact the founders in terms of what they're building how they articulate what they're building and I think you know as an early stage company is one of your key modes so I don't see this compromising that speed in terms of developing products taking them to market and scaling them uncle your thoughts uncle I think you did hi good afternoon everyone sort of you'll have to just you know recap the area of discussion I had logged out for some reason okay so like in the previous session we had the dr. Daniel from the AICT and you know there was a news today that AICT and UGC has asked to you know the company so I was just you know trying to gauge that does it in any way change your perception I mean inflection I know you have investments in net text to exit so that's a big you know kind of portfolio that you have so in any way does this regulation change your perception about net text or do you think it's just like Rishabh and Manish said that you know it's more of a you know that the company that the space is getting coming under regulatory framework means that it's getting legitimized so what do you think? I appreciate now I heard what Manish and Rishabh were saying I kind of agree so basically I think that this is more of a regulatory clarification it's much needed very important to have the rules of the game and I think it may still go few more iterations before we actually have an idea Rishabh took an example of e-commerce but Rishabh I can tell you even e-commerce is still up for grabs there are still a lot of grey areas where what is allowed what is not allowed and who can invest and who can not invest so I think overall this government has I would be very surprised if they do something which is very you know anti-startup and it's probably not even required because most of these startups are only enabling and strengthening the existing institutions and to so that extent my opinion and my perspective of the tech space in India does not change what would happen is that some business models will have to modify themselves and I think that kind of environment will be there in every sector it's not specific to edtech I think some regulatory clarity will keep on coming in different spaces even dream 11 may have to further modify their business model big unicorn businesses may have to do it, Amazon is still fighting on some regulatory ground elsewhere so I think that's part in parcel but I think overall as long as the theme is to strengthen the system and ensure benefit to the end users because I think to some extent some clarification you know it is actually correct to say that not everybody should be allowed to issue a MBA certificate and I think there is some merit in that I don't think degrees should be given for free but having said that there are so many other non edtech educational institutions which also are offering different courses so I hope that the government will take a more expansive view across the regulations and not just focus on edtech I think the one point that professor made was that the institutions which give degrees are non-profit they are not for profit so they have you know if edtech have to do that then they are which cannot I mean these two things I do not think can go hand in hand right true well most of them are not for profit only on paper while they are very profitable pardon yes that's the but that's the rule and I think there is already a way around it that you don't have to give degrees and you can give diplomas at the end of the day it is all about upskilling of the and maybe as India doesn't need so many MBAs maybe we need upskilling in different parts and maybe that is the kind of you know modification or pivots that edtechs will have to do but I think there is enough you know ways around it so I think one of them is a diploma versus a degree as long as you do that you are outside those gamut but I could be wrong also but even if that is not true then also I think you can structure it differently you can call it a training class you can call it an upskilling as long as your skills are such that they are even employers or even global employers I think it should work you said that this government is back the start-ups and wouldn't go just the irony is that the announcement came on 16th of January which was announced as the national start-up day and on the same day this notification comes so yeah so let's move on to the core topic of discussion that we were supposed to have today which is you know the edtech space to exit or invest more so Manish I like to come to you first what is your overall reading of this space I mean we have seen Pihamoth being created in edtech and M&A3 we have seen so much of money coming in in fact I was looking at some numbers numbers in terms of investment so India's edtech investment is almost comparable with you know the US last year and last year so what do you think is the space overheated or do you think it's just the tip of the iceberg and there is much more that can be done here thanks for playing that context so I think if you look at what education is to India right versus what it is to the US I think there is in itself a massive difference right I think education is like even culturally socially it is one of the most important levers of social mobility right it is like parents spend more on education for their kids than they would even spend in e-commerce or generally in shopping in retail outside so I think like in itself education is a massive category for India as a country and hence it's just natural that our investment in education matches with what is there in the US right and I just think this is tip of the iceberg so obviously there have been large companies which have been created in K-12 also we are seeing that now happening in upskilling which just puts the pressure on newer companies that are coming in this space to actually come up with something very differentiated but also on the other side and that limits the kind of investments or the amount of investments that you can make in this space but also on the other side it reduces like the fact that there are larger companies reduces your risk of investment because now even if let's say become really large there is always this possibility of M&A there is always this possibility of a larger competitor leveraging them and sort of combining a much stronger and combining and creating a much stronger entity right so like as an investor I think the presence of these large incumbents pushes the bar to innovate for newer companies but it also lowers the risk of investment when you invest in this space and I just think that they have done a great job in pushing the consumers towards acceptance of tech and as people now become more amenable towards learning online there is just so much opportunity that will be created right also one common theme across all of the large incumbents in tech today that have been created is that they are powered by a very strong sales force and they have a very strong strategy of driving sales through push whereas if I look at now the next horizon of companies that will emerge in this space will effectively disrupt this model which we've seen across multiple spaces so there is still a lot of potential that is like today at tech would be 5-7% of our at tech would be 5-7% of overall education spending in China that has reached 15-20% right in mature geographies you've seen that trajectory happening there is just so much more potential for this space and you having investments you know elevation having investments in topper and academy yellow class is a bigger name so I am sure that you are still bullish on this space absolutely yeah okay Rishabh move to you what do you think of this space is it overrated is it or you know such a huge country with so many you know the demography which is still in the space they need guidance education to achieve in their life do you think you still have a long way to go yeah so you know I continue to remain very very bullish and you know I think at jungle we have made one investment in India in a company called leap finance which is in the higher learning space we are working on two more one is language related which is in Vietnam and the other one is a very early stage one within K-12 in India so you know as a new investor to the space when I say new I'm talking last two years we continue to remain very very bullish I think the depth and you know I think the regulatory point we were discussing earlier is testament to the same that the depth is starting to emerge in the space the first wave of ed tech was companies that were helping with test prep you've seen a really really big push in K-12 you know in my mind largely in two buckets one is businesses that were creating and selling content and then the other one which we've seen companies like teachman class etc that have provided infrastructure on the back of a changing education environment the pandemic and I think we're going to see more and more verticalization whether that expands into you know more depth in higher learning or corporate training or then even going in the preschool space you're seeing a lot of interesting companies emerging there and various forms of skilling that are directly related to your curriculum in school or beyond so you know for me I don't think this is a juncture to think about exit the space I think it's a juncture to dive in deeper and see where that verticalization is emerging and find smart entrepreneurs and products to back I've made note I have three things that we'll come back to which is once we talk about Salesforce and we talked about language and verticalization but before we go to that uncle your thoughts on the space I think definitely it's not a question of exit completely although one of the things we are early stage investors and so one of the things we are doing to democratize angel investment is to create frequent exit opportunities but it doesn't mean exiting the sector or the space what would happen is and what has started happening is that there are certain sectors which are getting overcrowded so for example in the exam prep space I think we already have like you know five six unicorns and few unicorns and you know there's a lot of you have to basically ask yourself that okay you know what is it that they are truly doing different because you can pick up one or two exams and you can still become number one in those one or two exams but then you know then it comes to basically the you know the target market and also and these could be all higher revenue generating businesses but couldn't they become you know a big VC ideas is something that we evaluate on but what is different is then that you know in our talks to a lot of these unicorns and VC's is that a lot of these targeted exam prep companies now have become good targets for the unicorns so they can just acquire them and so from our point of view early stage investors that would still be a great exit opportunity so but yes there are certain spaces which are getting very crowded but at the same time Manish rightly said you know education has a very different place in India and what is now what is now happening is there are smart entrepreneurs and founders out there who are finding some small sub sub segments and going deeper into that and building their own niche and because the population is so big India is a very young country a lot of upscaling is required and therefore these small you know sub segments are also fairly large markets and from an exit point of view in the sense from our exit point of view as an investor both unicorns as well as startups as well as VC's are both future investors and therefore for us it still makes for an attractive sector to look at I think this answers one of the questions that I was trying to ask you is that verticalization so as you said that some sectors are now overcrowded and so I was just looking at some data so language and casual learning still is just one percent of total you know ethnic offering in India so do you think that now people and Parishabh also spoke about that you know he's working with a ethnic in somewhere which is in the language space so do you think that is the place where more people are going to move towards as we speak about Bharat what I'm saying is that there is still a lot of scope of growth there are certain sectors where a lot of growth has already happened and therefore for a new player coming in it may not be the most attractive of the opportunities but there are still pockets and segments which are still relatively virgin have not been evolved as well as they could and it's also natural transition once you have got your basic education then only you start getting into languages where you go deeper into languages we have invested in a startup called Multivashi which is into languages my son is learning French and Spanish from then and so on so there is still a lot of opportunities out there but I think still every idea will have to be treated on its merit it's a cliche but every idea will still because even in the exam prep space which is overcrowded I will not deny that we just invested in a startup toppers note because it was just a phenomenal business I mean the numbers were just unbelievable and they were competing with the best in the world at least in the country in the exams in which they are participating in so I think there is still an opportunity for certain areas even in the crowded space as you call it for startups to succeed Vishal welcome to you so as uncle said that even in crowded spaces there is opportunity which I am sure is a function of the sheer number of people that this country has and the other thing that you spoke about was language you are working with so do you think that's the next gold mine because that space has not been tapped much by the companies nor by the investors yeah I think I wouldn't say that it's the next thing but I think there are definitely a lot of emerging opportunities there to qualify what I was saying earlier we see a business in Southeast Asia that is focusing on language learning English language penetration being lower the need of the hour being for more of the middle class and emerging middle class to be well versed in that we have seen a favorable trend in the Chinese market in that sector with a couple of very very large businesses getting created and so we felt confident to move forward it's not announced here so I am not going to go into any other details there but I think we will see a similar trend in India I think uncle talked about one example and you are seeing that whole building for Bharat team come across some of the verticals we have seen I think there is a company called Pariksha which is doing that around certain types of government exams and jobs that come subsequent to that and you are going to see other verticals like that emerging in that Bharat team I think as jungle we have looked at a few early investments in that space we haven't in India we haven't developed the confidence to back any yet but we will definitely continue to watch it very closely because if you look at other large tech markets I think that has been a significant theme when you show views I think language learning as you rightly pointed out is a much smaller market in India as compared to at least in terms of size today as compared to if you pick up any nation which is non-English speaking there are unicorns and large companies that have been created China as multiple of them and it's not like no one has tried in India over the past decade there have been multiple attempts that have been made and generally monetizability of the audience that they have gone after has been one of the challenges which is why they haven't been able to scale up but as the masses today becomes more amenable towards learning online they also start and also the payment infra has been solved outright with UPI and micropayments kicking in with and we started seeing proof points in some of the other spaces whether it's gaming, real money giving etc so I think that monetization of this large mass will happen and language seems to be one of the strong axis through which you can monetize this audience so that will be a space but I don't think that that will be the only space that opens up to monetization that is a possibility I think there is a question by Ashutosh Dubey who said that would investors be interested in investing in a platform working for students of natural languages in India I think the answer has already been given that Manish said that that space has not been tapped as much as in the other countries so I'm sure the investors will look into investing in that area the next thing that Manish staying with you I'll come you talked about sales force that these companies have a huge sales force which is on the ground and which is pushing to generate leads and everything but that brings me to question that there is a certain section which believes that everything is not ethical that is happening with the sales force that is doing on the ground and without taking in but we have seen examples we have heard about it so what's your view do you think it's been being very overly aggressive or do you think it's the pressure to scale up or do you think it's the pressure from maybe investors that leads them to such an action yeah I can figure out that so see I don't think that the fact that most of our model today at sales force lead is bad actually if you think about it as any industry initially when the audience is not as amenable to learning online you have to convince them help them understand educate them we see that happening across industries if you think about sales force lead model actually that's an innovation which opened up at tech in India at tech for the past 20 if you look at from 2000 to 2010 at tech was always there all of these social tailwinds are already there but no one was ready to learn online and it required that innovation of having a strong sales force lead model which educated the audience convince them and help them by this so I think like as the industry matures we will move more towards a pull based model over time but the fact that many of the incumbents lead model actually I think is an innovation in itself what you pointed about misselling that happens in sales I think that happens across the spectrum whether you look at financial products whether you look at health products etc right so it happens and you know the fact that regulators as well as companies building in this space are cognizant about it and are taking measures to ensure that this remains in control is important this will never go away because finally you have an you have an incentive system you will always you will always have people or miscreants who will violate it but the focus should be in ensuring that this doesn't this doesn't happen as much and hopefully most of the stakeholders today will take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen I'm good coming to you money said that some misselling happens everywhere we financial product but education something you know even the poorest of poor would be shelling out maybe a life savings for their kids and everything and if that is the place where it is happening do you think you as a stakeholder would go to the head tech and tell them that hey listen we have invested in you we want returns but not at that discourse see I think you know ethics should supersede everything but doesn't mean that what is happening currently is unethical it is aggressive selling maybe playing to the FOMO but that happens in every industry in every sector and doesn't naturally make it you know unethical or anything like that having said that if yes there is something unethical happening then as investors we should you know raise our hands and stop it because in the end if there is something wrong then we will be held holding the downside of it also so as investors it is our job to make sure if anything wrong is happening the other thing is what Manish also mentioned a lot of push was also required because online education was not natural and few other things like application is not natural to us we are a country of notification you know you memorize what are the 10 things that happen in World War 1 and then you go and reproduce in your board exams and get your 90% and get your subject of your choice and that has been the education so what you are trying to now do is bringing in more application bringing in more thought process changing the way you teach self-learning through videos without a life teacher and sometimes this does require a little bit of push selling to educate the customers this would have happened even if corona was not there what corona has just done is that it has become a Tina factor there was no alternative but to do online learning and that just pushed forward the adoption but the practices would have happened even if there was no pandemic because a lot of these things to be honest were being delivered and that's what the push tactic was yes could there be an overzealous salesman could there be an overzealous person targets of course there will be and that happens in insurance sector that happens in banking sector I think more Indians there are many people who have multiple credit cards and they should not have had those many credit cards so this debate can continue till the end of time that what is correct and what is not correct at the end of the day my appeal would be to all the customers that please use your best judgment just don't get caught I tell this to my investors also don't get caught in FOMO just because everybody else is investing in a deal doesn't mean you should invest in a deal do your own due diligence build your own thesis build your own comfort and then go forward because anything tomorrow can fail and I think that would be the same that goes to the customers of these products point very well taken you know I'll go to Rishab few days back we were interviewing a large very large investor and he said that you know for the first time the LPs came back and asked that you know hey okay you made me this much of money now give me a report in terms of how much you know how many people have you actually touched have you helped so that kind of a social kind of a report card was asked so if you know if you ask the tech companies of that kind of a social report card obviously they will have good to say because they have touched so many students but these small little small little incident is I think somehow makes a person skeptical do you do you think so Rishab? Look I think it's a it's a fair point to when you read some of the things that come up in the media and you hear some about some you know negativity around some of these practices it's a very very fair ask from the investment fraternity to sort of sometimes even second guess second guess this but you know I would in general agree with you know what what my colleagues Manish and uncle said here you know feet on street aggressive selling this is not the first industry where we've seen this number one as you know we've already talked about some segments within a tech becoming fairly competitive right so as a founder or a team of founders getting your products and services top of mind getting them to market being aggressive in selling is in some way the need of the hour again anything unethical should just be a no go but you know it's not as black and white as that right we've seen that in other industries financial services being a good example and I think from investor fraternity asking the question is important but you know it's our job as fund managers to you know develop our own thesis and conviction behind a product behind you know the selling approach as well as the team and do our homework thoroughly before sort of going in so you know it's not it's not black and white here and it is going to evolve I think Manish made a good point in the beginning of the conversation where he talked about a push based approach eventually moving towards pull based and I think we're starting to see early early signs of that and I think once once that balance sort of increases between push and pull hopefully some of this some of this noise and chatter will go away as well and also I think as time passes and we see the real effect of these headache offerings on the students who are currently undergoing when they move forward in their lives maybe that would be a good validation you know for everyone to understand I believe yeah okay so you know so just one last question to everyone and then I'll hand it over to Bhavan and I'll request Manish and Rishabh to stay back for the awards as well so the budget is right you know is coming up and so what would be your expectations from the government in terms of you know facilitating growth of obviously we have seen one notification yesterday let's not talk about it but what more can we see Manish if I can start with you Saurabh I think largely you know the motive of I think what we've seen is that online education has become a part and parcel of sectors across education now across the board right but and I see a lot of cooperation between ed techs and universities that happens in higher ed right but yet to see a lot of that play out in the school system right and every other ed tech entrepreneur that we meet today tells us that selling to schools is hard right because of multiple issues between stakeholder privatization and aims and also maybe some government backing up the back right so like if there are if there are measures taken which also help in regularizing and also improving cooperation between to incorporate ed tech into schools right I think that will be a massive win for the entire ecosystem but that's the only thought I had at a high level okay uncle anything from you especially given that the education budget has not been too attractive for the for the past two three budgets I don't expect it to be any different I think this is a election year I think a lot of focus would be on the states going in for elections and so I would expect a lot of spend also going there in the sectors which matter I'm not saying ed tech doesn't matter but I think ed tech has grown significantly without any overly support and I think that is the power of B2C where it's need based I think people recognize the need and there are startups which are fulfilling those needs and I think that is a strong enough driver for the sector to grow I could expect because this government has shown positivity towards startup that there are certain startup focus developments that may be introduced in this budget which will benefit the startup as a whole ecosystem and may not necessarily specific to but I think ed tech will grow and succeed irrespective I think it's a great space to be yeah you know I think the expectation from the government would not I would necessarily couple it only to the budget right I think it would be an ongoing dialogue with the private sector to think about what type of regulation is needed we're also seeing the private sector come together you know we talked about some of these practices of selling we've already seen the private sector step up and create their own bodies to discuss these and to come up with internal frameworks of how to go about it because it has been a common theme that has come up so yeah I don't have anything specific to the budget but more importantly just a continuation of that interaction with the private sector so that the short and medium term can lead to that longer term benefit for the overall industry like we discussed earlier thank you so much Manish uncle and Rishabh for speaking to us kindly stay back while Pavla announces some awards and as I see that this sector ed tech is still not a place where anyone wants to exit everyone wants to stay here the sector which is going to grow from here thank you so much Pavla thank you so much sort of on that and well ladies and gentlemen with this it is time now in presence of our esteemed panelists to start off with the awards as you can see on the screen the best career planning platform and join me in applauding goes to Sri Chetanya congratulations to the entire team and may we request Priya Dasini ahead of communications to kindly join us thank you so much and great kudos to you team to have put up such a stellar event today and Rishabh Manish sir uncle it's lovely to hear you all and just when we are seeing that a lot of positive emotions have come with the sector where consortium has been formed and reiterating that schools are here schools are not just going away with a new fashion to be existing in a hybrid format and things like that glad to say that we have introduced 120 high flex classrooms across India in the first phase and just when we are on the growing trajectory going to tier 2 this is one brand that has become an iconic name with 37 years of existence and we are just growing and it's happy to have getting this recognition and thank you so much we look forward to be associated and do much more thank you and congratulations thank you so let's move on and find out the next winner as you can see on the screen K12 school chain of the year regional and that goes to Green Acres Education Services LLB well for this if I may request Miss Bonnie Vansali the principal to kindly join us yes Bonnie congratulations over to you hello everyone thanks for putting up this insightful webinar we at the Green Acres Academy believe in giving children experiences to a wide range of learning experiences skills and areas of knowledge to help them realize their true potential carefully designed curriculum aims to nurture well rounded free thinking capable individuals who will grow up to be change makers as we want to call them that is agents of positive change for their communities and champions of sustainable development thank you so much for this wonderful recognition thank you and congratulations to the entire team well with this let's move on and find out the next winner the best computer coding education solution and that goes to bright a chance well for this if I may request Ravi Singh CEO and founder to kindly join us do we have Mr Singh so we will just see if Mr Singh can join us but let's move on to the next preset please for the time being standalone school of the year regional and that goes to Canada International School well congratulations and may I request Shridhar see the dean to kindly join us I believe Shridhar is not around let's move on and find out the next preset please yes the best VPP for online scale education and that goes to chain online congratulations to the entire team let's find out who's the next winner dynamic use of artificial intelligence which is AI in education and that goes to practically congratulations to the entire team of practically let's find out who the next winner is as you can see on the screen at the best enrollment and admissions management solution of the year that goes to college they call congratulations the entire team and maybe request to Ruchi Arora co-founder and CEO to kindly join us Hi on behalf of the Coliseco family I accept this and we started Coliseco with a very strong passion of making sure that we are able to find in this all hard selling and and pushing on sales that we are able to get some method to the chaos and I think we'll be able to successfully do that we just closed that year with almost 100,000 plus applications on a platform by students so hopefully on that journey to become a product very soon thanks a lot for the award right congratulations Ruchi well I believe Mr. Sridhar has also just joined in Sridhar congratulations on the award for Canada would you like to contribute to your applause as well okay thank you for the recognition we are Cambridge and IB school and the simplest way to put what we do here is our logo which says preparing for life so that's what we have been doing it for the last 11 years we have been preparing students for their lives ahead and once more thank you for your recognition thank you and congratulations on that well with this ladies and gentlemen let's find out the next preset yes the rural skill learning and that goes to skill train app well congratulations to skill train app let's find out the final award in this set the best AI and tech based learning and that goes to board infinity well congratulations to board infinity and we are requesting our co-founder board infinity to finally join us hi everybody good afternoon thank you for this award I think how well some yes now we can say hi hi everybody great to receive this award I think what we do in one line is that we take early career professionals and higher education students find it difficult to compete in the job market after graduation they take our short duration courses and kind of increase the salaries by 100 percent and in that entire process they gain financial freedom for themselves and their families we've been doing this over the last four years I think we've been able to impact significantly last number of customers who have come to us and you know I think tying up to what discussions you know why I mean how we are growing and what is the right way to grow a tech business I think we have always focused around customer outcomes really well we're one of the very few companies which having around 88 percent placement outcomes of the customers who want placements through us and kind of maintain the 65 70 NPS code till now I believe that you know you can build a great education company by focusing on outcomes your brand will speak for years when your customer has successful outcomes coming through it and that's how we built last four years so it's been insane growth and customer outcomes that's how we have built it and I'm happy to receive this award and good to see a lot of family faces as well thank you very much right absolutely congratulations on that wonderful win uncle being our panelist just your word of congratulations to all the winners today we just request you to thank you uncle yes congratulations all the winners it is a you know as you're discussing on the panel it's not a very easy space to distinguish yourself and you know achieve what you guys have achieved keep doing the hard work wish you all the best thank you right thank you uncle your words of encouragement yes same I think congrats to everyone this is a great forum to be to be recognized and and yes please continue doing all the good work you're doing thank you and Manish congratulations everyone what you've definitely achieved is great like there are thousands of tech startups that get started every year but to be recognized and to be given these awards is definitely in itself an achievement so congratulations and keep keep up the hard work right thank you Saurav your final word no thank you so much Bhavana I think we have run out of time and I'm eagerly awaiting to hear Mr. Shibu comment so thank you everyone thank you uncle thank you Manish and Rishabh to be here today thank you so much all our panelists and congratulations once again to the winners ladies and gentlemen as Saurav rightly said it is time to move on to the next discussion as we have a great insight coming on the other side well it's a fire side chat going hybrid learning for educational institutes and we're joined by first up our speaker Mr. Shibu the co-founder former member of the boat and CEO of Infosys Limited in conversation with Dhrithumaria editor-in-chief entrepreneur India and APAC well S.D. Shibu the co-founder former member of the boat and CEO of Infosys prior to becoming the CEO and managing director Shibu served as the chief operating officer from 2007 to 2011 earlier Shibu held a number of senior leadership roles including the head of worldwide sales and customer delivery well it's an absolute delight and honour to have you with us joining and if I may request Ms. Mariah to join us and let's have a great conversation between Ms. Mariah and Shibu well over to you Ms. Mariah to take it forth Thank you Bhavna and I'm really delighted to have the presence of Mr. Shibu Lal here at the education innovation conference and indeed I think with the kind of good work and the anthropic initiatives that Mr. Shibu Lal has been doing with the S.D foundation for the education sector is quite exemplary and very laudable and you know they've taken initiatives both at the K-12 education level as well as the higher education level by encouraging more students to not leave their education after schooling but to continue by offering them scholarships and more recently they've also set up the Ed Mentum which is actually an incubator a startup incubator where they're encouraging a lot of digital ed tech startups to actually and fund them to help them grow their initiative so I'll warm welcome to you Mr. Shibu Lal it's wonderful to have you here with us and indeed we're looking forward to this wonderful chat with you so let me first start by asking you this that you know how was it how did the calling for education or being part of the education sector come to you technology entrepreneur you know you were one of the co you are one of the co-founders at Infosys so what motivated you to come and be part of the education sector you've been doing this since 1999 with the S.D foundation and particularly you and Mrs. Shibu Lal you know we would love to know more about your calling and what changes you wanted to see in the education sector that prompted you to be a part of it first of all thank you very much for inviting me it's a great pleasure and honor for me to be here to speak about education so when we in late 90s we wanted to actually start doing something in the social sector it was very apparent to me and Kumari that education is the best thing to do there are a number of reasons number one our own background we come from middle class families in fact Kumari is the first girl to go to college from her village so I got educated I got my masters from Kerala then I got another masters from US Kumari got educated in Kerala so the reason where we are today or we were in 1999 was because of the education which we got we thought really understanding the benefit of it when we got it and mostly the push of our parents so it was very evident to us that education is the most interesting field for us because of our background and our achievements and once we got into it we wanted to make of course education is a very vast field so in 1999 we started out with a very very small scholarship program for higher education we felt that there is a lot of work going on in the school education but people are getting you know growth and enrollment ratio in India today it is about 23 percent 23-24 percent when you look at higher education and that happens in my mind because of three reasons lack of awareness lack of accessibility lack of affordability and we felt that we can't address all of them so we decided to address affordability and awareness that is how we started our journey in 1999 with this scholarship program we have a lot of students today we have close to 5,000 students in the program we take them after 10th we take them when they join 11th we get probably 30,000 applications for 1,000 seats every year across India we operate in 11 states and we have hundreds and even hundreds of doctors and engineers and nurses and teachers and various other kind of professionals they are enormously productive in the country one last sentence we did an impact study a couple of years back and we found that anybody who goes through the program successfully is able to pull the family out of the below the poverty line they are able to bring the family above the poverty line in two and a half years so that shows the power of that shows the transformational power of education that certainly education has always given this opportunity for people to grow as a family as well as being able to elevate their own individual self with their generational self to a much bigger height and I think the wonderful initiatives that you are taking would certainly go a long way in helping students to take up education more fervently of course, Shikshalugam is the digital through which you empower education particularly I know that the objective of Shikshalugam is to empower the K-12 leaders to change with times that we are currently living in so what kind of transformation is it that you really focus on and what do you really believe K-12 needs to change in order to be able to live up to the times and to be able to help the post-secondary education sector the kids are not trained right at the K-12 level they will certainly not be able to do justice at the post-secondary level so how is Shikshalugam coming forward to fulfill that gap so as you know our education ecosystem is very complex very diverse very large you have about 250 million children in the education system you have about 1.5 million government schools a number of private schools RT has done a good job of actually increasing the reach of education I think RT has made it mandatory of course the national education policy focuses on the latest one focuses on foundation learning all that has happened so today if you look at the quantity of education has gone up all around more and more children are in the program the growth and enrollment ratio in the school system is high but when you look at the quality of education it has got to be deserved if you look at some of the reports some of the ACES reports for example you can clearly see that a fifth grader cannot do not have the reading comprehension of a second grader or a seventh grader do not understand maths as much as a third grader so while the quantity of education has gone above the years through RT through various other initiatives which government has done the quality of education needs to go up substantially for us right now any transformational change anywhere in the world you need good leadership without good leaders who can actually what I call sense make sense and act right that means they have to sense the need of the need of the ecosystem they need to make sense out of the what their sense and they need to act and create improvements for leadership and if you look at our school system there has been enormous amount of effort being put into teachers education capacity building for teachers there is a lot of work going into pedagogical aspects curriculum whereas when I looked around I found that there was much work going on in the capacity building for leaders now when I call leaders it is not one set of leaders you have actually the principals the coordinators the CRPs the CEOs the civil society organizations the parents themselves so there is a very large set of leaders who act in this ecosystem and they need to have the right set of tools the right set of knowledge right set of information to act and to transform the ecosystem so that is why we decided to focus on Shikshalagam Shikshalagam started in 2017 as a leadership capacity building initiative for K-12 now over the years Shikshalagam has reached has increased substantially today I believe there are about 4.5 lakh people in the 4.5 lakh people in the platform today now over the years Shikshalagam built three different capabilities number one it built a digital core a digital core which is actually using Sunbird as a support platform but it built a digital core around that it built a co-creation network so it is not about redoing everything for the ecosystem it is about building that co-creation capability building that co-innovation capability where people can come in and the digital core is an open platform people can come in they can co-create they can understand best practices they can learn from each other and then we built partnerships Edimandem itself is a way to build those partnerships over the years today we have about hundreds civil society organizations working with us so that has become the amplification network so you have the digital core you have the co-creation co-creation co-innovation network capability and then you have the amplification network so through that today Shikshalagum has reached various parts of the country it has various capabilities it has built and also we contributed the entire platform capability and the application capability which we built to the ecosystem so today it is part of the Iksha all the capabilities of Shikshalagum is readily available in the Iksha today which is the digital the national infrastructure so in Shikshalagum you have four different capabilities available Unnadi which is a micro improvement capability Samiksha which is an observation capability both which is a context in context learning capability and Dhiti which is an on-demand dashboard so Shikshalagum is all about building capacity for leadership in K2 education Sir also if I were to touch about digital education on the higher education side so today we have seen rapidly students have been taking higher education through digital platforms now when you are not in the campus when you are not doing practicals the kind of degree that you get is probably very different to the kind of degree employers have found acceptable earlier in times when we had all physical education happening in higher education institutes so now what is your message to both the students in higher education as well as to employers who are looking to recruit young talent you know how do they what kind of values they should place on the degrees and what values is it that they should look for in students when they are actually employing when everything has around us has been new and digital So I apart from this question I remember an old Mackenzie study that 25% of the people coming out of our colleges are employment ready that means 75% of the people are not employment ready even in our physical world right that was the study which Mackenzie published few years back so as I said while the quality we produce a million engineers every year right but 75% of them are not ready for employment so you really have a huge gap when it comes to quality of education or comparative output I think technology will allow you to bridge some of that gap that's how I see it see when you have physical education completely physical education you are in a sense in the same pace every student is actually moving in the same direction in the same speed there is really no scope for personalization because our scale is so huge you are talking about the classroom full of students which is 70, 80 70% of the students so they are really the ability to interact the ability to personalize the ability to customize is very very low so if you use the right set of technologies if you use the right set of tools you have an opportunity here to actually personalize you have an opportunity here to make the learning more more importantly at any pace so I believe that these kind of interventions can increase the quality of education at K-12 as well as at higher education level but remember education is not only about content it is also about character when I talk about character I am not talking about you know one dimension of character it is also about you know life skills, social skills, negotiation skills, work ethics value system so when you look at use of technology in education you have to keep this in mind that education in my mind is a contact sport that means where you come across your teachers physically so you have to balance the use of technology I think there is tremendous amount of value which can be derived from the use of technology because if you look at in progress technology has made a very very big part and I don't see any reason why it will not happen in education at the same time education is a contact sport you have to have a hybrid of both Yes sir I think that is also something that we have been discussing in the earlier sessions the need for hybrid education and how it should probably be looking in the future so you touched upon teaching you know the teaching skills of teachers very briefly when you answered the last question if you could kindly elaborate on it you know particularly in India when you mentioned that 25% of the people are employable do you think at some point of time we would also need to work on our teachers to ensure that that numbers can go up significantly and what is it that we should be doing and how can edtech play a very important role in making the teachers far more capable to be able to give the right education delivery in a hybrid space as we are looking forward for it to evolve So when I look at the end-day value chain of the learning environment or the teaching environment I see three different parts number one is the learning process which the students do and the teachers do because the teachers are also learning on the way so you have the learn process which is actually the teachers and the students are both involved then you have the help-learn process that is the teachers and the principals and the other members that are helping the students learn and you have the marriage-learn process so you have the learn, help-learn and marriage-learn there are three different aspects with this chain and technology can play a very big role in any one of them right all three of them really speaking when it comes to students you are talking about personalization you are talking about technologies like AR and VR you are talking about you know blended learning offline, online, synchronous and synchronous you are talking about anytime, anywhere learning possibilities provided you have to address all the challenges with connectivity and things like that when you talk about teachers I think there is an enormous amount of value which technology can bring whether it is about learning the learning process itself whether they can look at new ways of teaching new ways of pedagogy also remember when you use technology to learn your your arena of learning is global you are not limited to local aspects of learning right you can actually listen to a lecture conducted by somebody in Sanford or Harvard or in India from any other university and learn from it right so you can actually create you can really access content across the globe and learn from those best practices also it is a very good way to build collaboration it is a very diverse country we have so many different languages so many different regions so many different cultures so one solution will never fit all in fact one solution in Banguru will not fit in Huzoor but at the same time there is that best practices which can be learned and adopted so the technology will allow you to do that you can actually we of course run a couple of schools and I tell them to bring in teachers from other institutions into the classroom through the digital technology that would have never happened before right I can bring in an expert from another classroom to my my own classroom so I think there is a tremendous value to be created in the in the help learn space building capacity for teachers training them also in context monitoring is possible using technology usually when you train even if you look at students or look at teachers while they are learning you are actually doing base learning at the beginning and base learning at the end right you are not doing in context observations whereas when you use technology you can look at in context observations and make changes to your response so the technology can do that without human intervention that means your learning pace can slow it can slow you down if the learning phase is fast it can speed you up you have a doubt you are not clear on some concept then you can go deeper into the concept so it gives enormous amount of flexibility to the teachers and to the students and of course when you talk about managing learn it is all about getting one truth in my mind it is creating one version of the truth that means what are the learning outcomes you know various data points which we collect right for example in Punjab I realized we realized through Shikshalagam that there are more than one in fact I think we realize that about 11 or 12 people go to the classroom for observations and they observe the same set of things from various organizations right various institutions various government departments 11 people go into the classroom for the same set of things we could realize that the moment we apply technology of course you can reduce the number of people going or you can actually rationalize the observations that will become much more effective so I think in the management space also I think there is enormous amount of value which you can create through technology so to answer your question I think technology could be a good tool just like we use it for leadership development Deeksha actually use it for teachers development so I think teachers development capacity building and teaching can be done through technology sure sir and also let me ask you a little more about of course you have an investment term which is Axelor Ventures through which you invest in various startups and particularly if I was to talk about and there is of course Ed Bentham which is a startup incubator only for ed tech startups that you have so what kind of technologies is it that you want to see yourself investing in through these both these arms and largely if you have any message to young ed tech founders you know about how they should or how they should look at future education delivery maybe like a decade from now what so Axelor was started with the single most idea to make sure that early entrepreneurship is successful because if you look at it traditionally in the world one out of ten startups actually survived the second year and we wanted to actually in fact we had a very humble objective to make it two out of ten which is actually a hundred percent improvement and I think we have done far better than that over the years so it was about you know supporting the early entrepreneurs through their journey seven years are over we have a very large number of investments and I think we have a very good track record we have been able to increase that success rate substantially over the over the years. Edimendum is not focused on ed tech their start their edimendum is focused on social enterprises that means these are NGOs one thing we realize that when we looked at the people the social sector organizations working in education we realize that the number of organizations focused on full school transformation through leadership development what we call whole school transformation through leadership development we found that the number of organizations focused on that was quite low so we wanted to encourage whole school transformation and leadership development in K-12 so we said that we would work with 50 organizations in five years we will incubate 50 organizations in five years so we started in I think 2017 we had six in 17 nine in 19 so far I think in 21 and 22 we took nine organizations each so we have organizations which we supported in 15 states and seven of them out of the 23 organizations it's a three year program by the way this is an idea pilot scale up first year we tried to help them crystallize the idea second year we help them pilot and third year we help them scale we fund them for the one or two years I think first two years I think for the founders that's what we do so that they don't have to worry about their income for the first two years seven of those organizations have signed state level abuse for example when we work in Punjab we work with some of these organizations we work in various states we work with these organizations and seven of these organizations have signed state level abuse and raised about 2.5 crores of funding so in the third year we help them raise funding from either through CSR or to other names because to become eligible for certain CSR and other things you need a track record you can create that track record the first two three years and then they become eligible for funding and other FCRA and things like that I think we have about you know and I think our organizations organizations we integrate and works in about 20,000 schools today across the country that's the number I have so our goal is to have 50 of them to work with 50 of those kind of organizations and we have 20-23 sure sir so thank you very much for sharing these facts if we'll take a couple of quick questions which are coming in as you were talking so there is one question asked by Amit Sharma who wants to know that can we expect government NGOs and ed techs probably coming together in some way to make technology devices affordable and accessible to people at the lowest rate of the society which is that you have 67% of the households have smartphones today which was probably 30% about four years back so while the number of devices has gone up the accessibility of those devices for the students is still low because many households will have one device which is probably they claim it as one device but devices owned by an adult which means that it is not available for the student to use it all the time data continues to be a problem so there are many many aspects which you need to address if you want to go take advantage of the digital education across the country especially in rural areas you have an affordability issue you have an access issue quality of access issue and a device problem so I think there is a need for various actors to come together whether it is government whether it is civil society organizations whether it is organizations attack organizations I think there is a need for everyone to come together and try and solve the issue and I am hoping that they will otherwise while we go through this digital revolution in education which in some sense got accelerated because of covid there is no doubt because the barriers of adaptability came down drastically because of covid my own teacher is telling me that oh Shibu it is impossible we will never do it 2 weeks before the covid and 2 weeks after the covid everybody was cautious everybody was using online so the adoption issue has been accelerated and the barrier to adoption barrier to acceptance have come down drastically at the same time the other physical issues like accessibility affordability continues to be there so I am hoping that we will be addressed by one single institution or one single entity or one single sector it will require coming together of various various parties to address these aspects Sure Sir there is another question from Ashutosh Dube who says that today do you think we need more startups which would be working towards or helping students for vernacularization of education delivery Yes I think as I said sometime back our education system is enormously complex extremely large and very diverse which means that you need solutions which are very very local very very contextual very very regional and language is very very important part of this so it is very important to have enough capacity whether it is startup capacity whether it is government capacity whether it is teaching capacity and there is enough capacity which will create those capabilities language is not the only challenge you have other pedagogical issues which you need to deal with so it is very important to have enough capacity to handle this diversity Sir so now with your warm presence here we would also like to give away some education innovation awards and I would request Pavna to please join us here and if she could kindly do the and several facilitate the awards Absolutely thank you so much Thank you and thank you so much Mr. Chibulal for joining us and what an impactful fireside chat has been without further ado let's go on to our awards could we have the first preset yes and right on the screen well deserved lifetime achievement award goes to Mr. Chibulal co-founder Infosys I would request everyone to applaud and give as much energy as possible thank you and with this we definitely request you to say a few words congratulations Mr. Chibulal I don't know I am honored and a bit surprised actually but I am very honored it's indeed a privilege to get an award I actually receive it on behalf of my wife who actually spends most of the time on this matter but we do it jointly but I will receive it on behalf of both of us thank you very much Thank you and congratulations on that with this we are going to move to the next preset as you can see on your screen the best robotics for learning education solution goes to Okid the international school congratulations Okid on that if I may request Nareesh Ramamurthy head academic products to join us Hi thank you so much for having me over and this is a privilege and an honor Okid we really care about providing a good quality STEM education I would say STEAM education and specifically for robotics what we do is we have robotics kits right from grade 1 on once all the way till grade 10 which is integrated into the curriculum as a subject and children learn to tinker and play with different tools and they build parts as early as grade 3 and this is something that was very critical and we have been working towards it and thank you for recognizing this and honoring us for this one thank you so much for this Absolutely congratulations with this let's move on and find the next preset on the screen let's find out who wins it requesting the team on the next preset please Meanwhile we hope you all are having a great time as you can see on the screen edtech CEO of the year and that goes to Mr. Gaurav Mujal CEO and Academy well congratulations on this incredible win Gaurav with this let's move on and find out the next win please yes the excellence and innovation in online teaching and that goes to 21K school congratulations to the entire team let's move on and find out the next win please Well the entrepreneur of the year and that goes to Mr. Meheel Gupta co-founder CEO teaching Well congratulations to Meheel with this requesting you to join us on the stage and screen congratulations Thanks a lot and this is a great recognition really humbled and grateful to see this really excited to see that education infrastructure digital infrastructure for education is being recognized at this stage at the larger level I think we took a radical hit one and a half years back on focusing on educators and creators and teachers rather than students and that is something that has really created massive impact in terms of millions of teachers in India adopting digital tools along with the teaching platform we were just talking on this forum on what technology can do for teachers and that is exactly the space that we are in really grateful and this award goes to hundreds of teachmates as we call the teaching team here and the teachers millions of teachers on the teaching platform Thanks a lot Absolutely congratulations being here on that Well with this we go to the final set of awards in this set Could we have the presets please Well the most breakthrough product of the year and that goes to N-PAR Congratulations to N-PAR on that Well for that request to feel Mujekar founder and CEO to kindly join us Thanks then the Entrepreneur India for giving this award and we humbly received that the society which is so obsessed with marks and grades we actually took a dent four years back in terms of nurturing entrepreneurial mindset among children and how do we do that when that time it was more of a luxury and kind of extracurricular activity today fortunately it's becoming importantly taking entrepreneurial mindset as one of the important crucial life skills building and blending a curriculum around design thinking technology of the future for children to use that as enabler for innovation and then entrepreneurial mindset are some of the pores to empower we once again thank a lot for this kind of a thing but this recognition a strengthens our belief in the road that we have taken I must also humbly dedicate this award to the resilience of the team in power and all the thinking coaches that we have around the country who just keep only doing two things loving what they do and doing what they love Thanks absolutely congratulations Ashil on that well with this let's move on and find out the final few presets in this while the most immersive learning product of the year and that goes to immersive learning quiz congratulations to the team let's move on and find out who wins it next as you can see on the screen emerging product or service for home based learning goes to Kuduki congratulations to the entire team out there and let's find out the final winner in this set well the best to stem a solution for K-12 that goes to smart already congratulations to the team out there and with this we conclude on this set of winners thank you for joining us and you know I just before we exit we just like words of encouragement from Mr. Shibu Lal to all the winners today of course with the lifetime achievement award going to you as well just your final words over to you once again I think it was a pleasure for me to be here and also to receive the award my congratulations to all of you I think you know if you look at our country we are in some ways at the threshold of the next wave of development I see the next 50 years a period where India will achieve its rightful place as a developed nation in the world I believe it will take us few years but I think we will get there in the next 30 to 40 or 50 years and in my mind education will pave the foundation will be the cornerstone of this strategy cornerstone of this journey we are a very young nation we have a very large demographic dividend in our favor at the same time it can be a liability if we do not provide them with the right opportunities for education skill building employment and that is where all of you are playing that is where while you are building companies while we are building civil service organizations while we are doing what we are doing we are building a nation we are empowering our youth we are building a nation so I wish you all the best thank you and with this final set of words from Ms. Varan a big thanks to Mr. Shivulan for really showing us the vision for what we are going to be doing as a nation in the times to come and I think education sector would probably change the entire landscape of how India is going to grow and envision their careers the young India of course in times to come thank you Mr. Shivulan for joining us and my many congratulations to all the award winners and of course to Mr. Shivulan for being the lifetime for the lifetime achievement award thank you for joining us today thank you congratulations once again to all the winners and thank you Mr. Shivulan for your time and all the expertise and intelligence you brought to the concave thank you once again bye bye so ladies and gentlemen with this what an excellent fireside chat that was and we had greater wins right there let's move on to the next discussion on campus, off campus making students ready for tomorrow this session will be moderated by Ms. Puneetha Kapoor a deputy editor entrepreneur magazine and joining Puneetha would be our speakers first up Dr. Balak Prishnan Gandhi Global MBA and MGB SP School of Global Management we've got Professor Rajesh Khanna President NIIIT University Dr. Sachin S. Wormaker Dean and Director of Faculty of Management Studies Bharti Vidyapeet University we've got Professor Amreen the Joint Director Central Institute of Educational Technology which is NCE ERT and we've got Dr. Raj Agarwal, Professor and Dean EIMA greater than CME so congratulations once again to all the winners and thank you to all our panelists for joining us with your value of time with this I pass on the live agent to Ms. Puneetha to take it forth thank you so much Pavna for the kind introduction ladies and gentlemen with the Omnicron variant being omnipresent more colleges and universities today are making major changes in how they'll open for the next semester and considering this timeframe we have a very topical topic to discuss today which is on campus and off campus making students ready for tomorrow and for this we have a stellar panelist lined up for you to answer many of your questions and before that we would like to get into the discussion mode with all of them so welcome all of you and with this I would like to considering the paucity of time I would start with Dr. Rao Garwal who is the professor and director of IMA CME so Dr. Rao Garwal to start with you've been in this profession for more than 35 years and you're also visiting faculty at various international universities so are there any learnings which you think we can draw from international universities to understand how to make our students ready for the future thank you first of all for inviting me in this prestigious conference I was listing the keynote address and your award function and I really find it very inspiring and definitely this is a good initiative by your organization as far as this students readiness is considered and then linking with their employability linking with their employment and linking as a good citizen of this country there are the various aspects which needs to be taken into consideration when we talk about new education policy or when we talk about about the prevailing education system in our country first and when we talk about the international comparison so then first of all that in an ecosystem the kind of this development, industrial development this development of the services and then development of agriculture and then development of the small scale industries so as far as providing this employment that is very very important now this first of all the kind of this growth rate which we are achieving definitely this is commendable but when we compare the growth rate in a context of the kind of this students which we are coming out each and every year then we find that there is a need that further this growth rate that can be accelerated because this has happened in so many developed nations growth rate was higher and then this employability that too was very high and then side by side this is what this demographic position this is again important factor so here this is what that in what way MSME sector in what way services sector in what way this is agriculture sector this is growing up this is first important part and second important part which is widely talked in so many studies that this is the employability part so then definitely when we take into consideration international system then we find a big gap between theory and practice so means that this industry interaction in terms of this creating competencies creating the right kind of this youth in campus for that purpose there is a need that there should be a comprehensive faculty development program because when we know and when we are aware that faculty is not industry trained of faculty has not integrated with industry so means that how faculty members they can develop right kind of this competencies right kind of this this skills among students so then definitely this is the second important challenge third important challenge which is very important from that particular context of this new education policy that in our country this role of regulatory bodies like UGC like this AICT in terms of creating a kind of the right kind of infrastructure not by intervention by providing autonomy so then there can be a sustainable development of education system now in our country there are the variety of colleges variety of institutions variety of universities and likewise this today just now I was going through a news of this times of India this is what that this AICT will come heavily this is what that as far as tech companies are considered so while giving this recognition or while taking into consideration qualities of these companies so again you see that although there is a time for this budget presentation and in last budget there was very little that was given to the education so now there is a time that we should take very proactive steps as far as creating that kind of environment in this budget also so then we can implement new education policy and then we can we can create the right kind of environment as far as this employability as employability of students those who are coming out from the campus is considered so these are my initial remarks so thank you thank you doctor for sharing your concerns I will come back to you further to move on I would like to come to you doctor Gandhi doctor Gandhi what are your views I mean about adding value to the career of students as well as professionals would you like to tell us more about your experience of making them ready for the world thank you Puneeta by the way I am a Gandhi and not the noble Gandhi I have an hour in my last night okay about it thank you for giving me this opportunity Puneeta the EdTech I think is doing a brilliant job of nurturing EdTech companies and they are going to be adding immense value in nurturing students and growing the economy in the long run SPJN is a boutique business school and we focus only on management and we do not have any other alike schools the COVID has caused enormous anxiety amongst all the stakeholders of an educational institution be it students the parents and the corporates that we are grooming the students for we believe the most significant stakeholder here is the corporates to me they are the customers and we need to take their anxieties into consideration COVID has you know destroyed the ability of the companies to create a stakeholder value they have been fighting for survival recent McKinsey study has shown a study of CXOs across the globe that nearly 87% of the CXOs felt that they are totally unprepared to handle the COVID and they do not have the capability and they have a lot of openings the reality today is there is no jobs crisis but there is a skills crisis there are a lot of people looking for jobs but the kind of skills is needed to handle the post COVID management challenges are completely different what is it like to be able to add value they need to cope with the ambiguity manage uncertainty to me it's like the corporates in a boxing ring you don't know where the opponent is going to give you land his punch you have to be continuously agile nimble ready to respond and duck and avoid the punch and this is the situation the corporate arena so what we have done at SPGN is we have revisited all the elements of an economic program we have revisited the learning outcomes all the faculty we have huddled together in multiple zoom sessions and fortunately with us we have a large percentage of faculty who are from the industry who are consultants so they could bring in the anxieties that the corporates are having blended with the theoretical concepts and frameworks and deliver high impact learning so what we teach how we teach and the pedagogy the assessments everything has been revisited because we are under enormous pressure we have been ranked the fourth best in the world for a one year MBA program and we need to stay there or even get better and being a boutique business school agile and nimble we have been able to do that and we continue to do that and it's a learning exercise for all of us thank you very much sure thank you thank you Dr. Gandhi so coming to you Professor Khanna because Dr. Gandhi spoke about a certain skill set so I would like to ask you how are you developing the curriculum that needs to be theoretical and experimental and how do you develop it in accordance of the coming future thank you good afternoon to everyone see this problem of not being prepared for future and what skills are required this is just one instance the current one where we had issues with social distancing people falling sick the capacity going down and in person teaching that we have all developed over centuries just remember we had special places where students would go and cut away from everywhere else like groups so starting from there we are now in a place where we are just online teaching so the challenges have been huge but to just address this particular challenge we at NIT have taken a view that this will only be limited in scope we don't know what future challenges are going to come in this particular challenge thankfully we could overcome this by digital methods and our earlier preparation with online teaching hybrid teaching which we were already doing because of our curriculum so that held us in good stead and we could deliver the content and the teaching so the process wise of the aspect of delivering was never a problem for NIT University because we were already there so for a full one year we ran as a digital university where we did everything on time we could delivery so the delivery part was our very strong point we were already doing it but as Dr. Gandhi said we need to revisit and we need to see that an undergraduate student who goes through certain courses certain practices and gets ready for the industry is the skills which would be required will change we don't know what skills would be required even with all the Mackenzie reports we don't know what skills would be required in 10 years time and a student doing undergraduate now is to be productive for next 50 years just imagine 50 years later also he will be productive he should be able to have the skills that would be required at that time 50 years from now so the problem of solving the current deficiency in skill is probably not the right way the right way would be to break it into so at NIT what we have done the right way for us was actually to break the skills into fundamentals and then see that these fundamentals of physics, chemistry, maths biology and you arrange them in a particular way and then you make this journey from these fundamentals to skills and have test cases on that and then have stories around that and have examples on that have projects on that and also do the reverse where we pick up an industrial problem and we have a set of students from final year from third year from second year and first year and then they are interacting with with the industry people and then they are trying to solve problem and demanding what knowledge is required to solve that problem so one of them would be the CEO of that particular startup kind of thing which will be designated to solve that particular problem somebody would be doing the marketing part somebody would be doing the physics part somebody would be doing the maths part and these will all be students spread from final year to first year so in that sense they are intimately connected to the problem which is the current problem because it's coming from the industry and they are demanding and they are then being taught the fundamentals so that journey from problem solving to fundamentals because see the fundamentals are not going to change so much so the fundamentals of physics, chemistry, maths bio, philosophy, economics those will remain so those are the knowledge sources and that's our best bet if we can morph these knowledge sources to a problem solution that is the best we can do with the present generation so if you talk about students the best thing would be to show them how a complex problem of the outside world from outside the in the corporate world from outside the school setting can be solved by the principles the fundamental principles of education or the knowledge sources so this we have been doing at NIT and this year also we did that and there are many many examples where we have been very very successful because we looked at the fundamentals from these set of students who have gone through this routine to see how much they have grasped so their learning capacity increases and the ability to gather these things to make a solution so if you see this is like triangulation you see so they know A they know B but they can then combine A and B to generate C a new knowledge and this is our best insurance against future challenges because skills currently we know digital skills are required cloud computing is required manufacturing robotics that is required we know cyber security is important we know digitalization how to convert companies to be in a digital world and how to you know make use of all that you know all those things that we need today we can take care of but we don't know what what more would be required maybe you know in future we require you know lot more of space science you know for the last 20 30 years space science was something which was taught only to and very few people opted for it you know we even have a joke it's not space science or it's not rocket science when we say something very elusive but maybe in 10 years time this is what we need so what kind of physics would be required and what kind of mindset would be required to think about those things so these change these things change and you know other than digitization which is not even a separate subject now it is so immersive it has it is so ingrained in everything we do that it would probably be not right to call it as a separate thing I mean it's it's we are all now digital completely so for these new skills we don't know nobody knows you know and we can say you know that we can predict that but it's very difficult so we latch on to the knowledge sources we have a generation who knows how these knowledge sources can be converted to a new skill set or to a knowledge so at that fundamental level and to make that process very quick so that learning process very quick making use of a hybrid mode flip classrooms technology taking away the constraints of you know time and space and all those flip lectures everything that's what we are doing at the 90 and to my mind that is our best bet and so I leave it at that and that that kind of ensures against any possible thing that can come so thank you so thank you thank you Professor Khanna we will come back to you for more such information so talking about insights Anish I would like to come to you because you've been a flag bearer of learner focused education so what more insights you can share about how this changing times have been at time special learning and how are you dealing with them and talking to your students thank you thank you and I must say it's been a very enlightening afternoon listening to Mr. Shiva Lal earlier and to all the very very highly qualified panelists on this show I am probably unique in that respect that I am probably the only non traditional HEI participant I belong to depending on your point of view either the much celebrated or the much maligned tech part of the part of the future but the challenge that we see especially from a learner point of view is that see the Indian learner has traditionally seen the root of education as leading to a productive life right and that's the whole Saraswati leading to Lakshmi kind of argument and in both pre-COVID as well as in post-COVID times our challenge has been the same the challenge is that of access affordability and awareness and these are the points that Mr. Shiva Lal has made as well in his keynote address so I think one of the big challenges that we have as a country especially in the context of our slowing population growth in the context of our lack of infrastructure for formal education in the context of our dismal employability data of graduates and equally dismal dropout rates from both K-12 as well as higher education. The debate is not so much about whether it should be on campus or off campus I think the debate should be how can we as an ecosystem come together and ensure that we are able to pull many more students into the formal higher education bracket and leading them into employability so as times professional learning we try to be the bridge that becomes a protective net for students who have either completed the graduation and are looking for employability or they are working professionals who are looking for upskilling to be continued to be relevant in their careers so it's a very interesting mix and I think as Dr. Gandhi had said very eloquently the customer here is the employer and it is in the acceptability of the employer that all our modus of higher education will ultimately come to rest. So I think it's very critical that as a system we come together and we start redefining how we look at learners, how we look at learners independent of the mode of learning that they have acquired their degrees or diploma certificates through and really look at how we can create a physical stroke, digital stroke hybrid environment where the quality of skills that we impart as a higher education system to the learner really adds value to that learner and really adds value to industry as a whole and I think it's there that the focus will lie going forward. We are going to become a multi-sided platform and we're going to become a platform where the voice of industry will be heard much more in academic circles and vice versa. So I'm really looking forward to the debate shifting from off-campus on campus to hey what is it that we can actually do to fix the fact that too many of our students, too many of our young adults in this country do not get the chance to become productive citizens of this country. So that's where we come in and that's where we hope to continue working. Thank you, Puneetha. Sure. Thank you. Thank you for sharing those insights. So coming to you, Dr. Sachin Vennekar, you've been part of an expert committee of 400 institutions. What kind of changes you have seen across them? Can you share further on this? Yeah, Puneetha ji, thank you. I must congratulate at the very outset the entrepreneur education and your entire team for bringing the humanist personalities on one plan. I fully agree with all the prominent panelists and as you rightly pointed out I must tell you that in this hookah world that is which is volatile and this pandemic has proved how volatile this world is. In this hookah world that is volatile, uncertain, a lot of complexity and ambiguity. So every student, every one of us, if we feel blessed, only when we feel blessed when we are blessed. So everyone wants to be well blessed and therefore he will or she will feel blessed and he is not stressed. Now today in this hookah world everybody is stressed as very rightly pointed out by various personalities. In the corporate world the students, the teachers everybody is stressed though they are well blessed. Now a good school blessed, a good business school if you are blessed and then good job you get, you become a successful entrepreneur, you feel definitely blessed otherwise stressed and today the entire world is under stress. I just want to instead of going theoretical, I just want to emphasize what exactly we do at Bharti Vidyapit Institute of Management and Entrepreneurship. So as very rightly pointed out by NSG, instead of on campus and off campus, from beginning at our Bharti Vidyapit and being faculty of management, what we have done is, we have ensured that the activities we organize. One of the best activities that we have is Industry Institute Partnerships. What we do under this is we invite the corporates, the HR managers, the CEOs, the academicians and the students and there is a panel discussion and we try to find out the skill gap, what industry expects as it has been pointed out only 25% of the graduates are employable. So we are trying, the skill sets are very very important. We are trying to find out what are the skillset that are required with the industry and what we academic institutions are offering and based on that we design the syllabus. And very importantly with the corporates as very rightly pointed out by Granthiji, the corporates are our customers. We have to tailor our curriculum our activities to the needs of the corporates. So what we do next is very important why we did not find it difficult at Bharti Vidyapit to switch on to Digital World is in March 2020 when the lockdown was declared. Fortunately various activities that we have been doing like seven tire counseling fire tire feedback system, CWTED that is community work through entrepreneurship development. You are into entrepreneurship and a promotion of entrepreneurship. Let me tell you everybody who is well placed in a family good family, good school, good business school, he feel blessed but there are many who cannot join because of their financial position for a background. They cannot join the various educational institutions like us. So what we have started and this is the unique activity we are doing and that has really helped many self-employed people, this small entrepreneurs develop themselves. What we do under this is we ask our MBA students to join hands whether he is a Panipuri Wala or a very any carpenter or anybody a small entrepreneur on the roadside. We teach them what is cleanliness, what is Sachu Bharat, we tell them how can they market and all these guidance is given by the faculty through the students to them and there is a hand holding and the student ensure there are two advantages. One is we are developing them, helping them develop their business and students understand what kind of hardware these people are putting because generally the MBA students when they come immediately after the graduation they want a car a big salary and all that but when they see these people working and join hands they understand many. So this is the CWTED that we do the digital hub that we had developed we had integrated MOOCs the online courses in our curriculum. So we had already trained our faculty to go for the online courses, MOOCs etc. and that has really helped and one more important thing I must tell you if you have 5 tire feedback and 7 tire counseling at every stage pre-admission to from admission to alumni we ensure that they are done complete counseling and that has really helped in this pandemic particularly in this hookah world that has really helped us we have collaboration you had asked the important question to Raj Agarwal G and very rightly pointed out by him. We need to the light of the NEP national education policy the vision of the national education policy is to develop the global citizen sense of belongings towards the country and cross-cultural relations. So what we have done we have gone for many collaborations 30 plus you know cities in the world so that students go there there is a faculty exchange there is a student exchange they understand even in this pandemic fortunately because of the digital setup digital hub we could continue that student exchange in the faculty exchange very important is the corporate day the alumni day the industrial disease the blended learning the joint research project that we do we have made it compulsory for the students to write research articles so we are trying to develop their aptitude and attitude towards everything and there are many we ours was the first university in India to start cyber security as opposed to start digital sorry disaster management as it was road safety and traffic management as it was so we see what is the need and accordingly we develop our students our placements have never been a problem it's always 100% but what we emphasize on is entrepreneurship the institute is trying its best to develop the entrepreneur so that they can face the future challenges their future ready and they will always feel yes so this is what we are doing not only we are focusing on faculty development the management development and the students are the holistic development of the students is emphasized at IMU so if we go ahead with this I don't see any problem for the students to face future challenges so these are the practical things we are doing thank you very much have a great day. Thank you thank you Dr. Venakar you must say these are some real life examples that we have shared so coming to you professor Amrendra Bahaira who is also joined by us who happens to be the joint director of NTRT. Professor Bahaira you have been involved in developing various courses and training for media students so how inclusive you think are these considering today's changing times. Thank you very much madam can hear me yeah for some to interact with the whole world on these issues whether on campus or off campus ultimately it is quality can you hear me properly yes we can hear you thank you very much and as far as the NEP 2020 is concerned it has given a lot of place on digital technologies whether on campus or off campus and in the pandemic situation also we have shown through Dixia Swayam E. Paksala even missed integrated training for 8.5 million teacher itself has proved that technology is there to help and whether it is on campus or on campus it hardly matters but there are some alarming areas challenging areas like we have 26 children in school education set up so if they are at home their experiential learning and competency development is a major challenge so in that case we need a platform like PAL personalized adaptive learning platform so starting from registration to certification to credit transfer to work making them workforce so whole tracking and monitoring and helping every child to acquire basic skills and competencies is the key so in a way artificial intelligence robotics, AI and machine learning need to help us because India as for our scale and the equity and the quality is concerned even the diversity is concerned whether linguistic, cultural or geographical because we have more than 1700 languages in the country more than 5 distinct language families Aryan, Dravidian Oslo-Essiatic, Tehvata-Varman and Andamanian so having digital content in Indian languages is also key so we need to develop content in those areas and in covid pandemic situation when children are not accessing the labs so accessing labs and virtual labs because again the section of frog is banned in our classroom so environmentally so in that case how virtual labs can help us to learn science, to learn mathematics and to learn languages and social science so even if we are talking about recreating history in the classroom or learning history so how cellular in Andaman Nicobar island is connected to history and taking a virtual treat to that similarly if I am talking about geography so having the modern volcano in Andaman Nicobar island and watching it live is a challenge for every child but if we have a video or live video recorded and children they see and recreate the volcanic eruption in the classroom and think so in that way AR augmented reality virtual reality, virtual labs are key factors for learning providing them experiential learning and competencies and again why I am saying PAL personalized adaptive learning situation because in pandemic situation you might have seen that board examinations also it was a result for us to hold board examinations and based on marks they have acquired earlier and the children were marked so to reduce that child on every day basis is monitor the progress is monitored through AI based platforms and which is compliant to India national digital education architecture developed by government of India the Ministry of Education and Ministry of electronics and IT so that will be more meaningful even the NDR talks about 32 building blocks which is connected including the teacher the deployment transfer posting and all so those needs to be monitored online so that we prepare them and reduce their managerial work and help them to continue teaching should be in win situation for the stakeholders that is why we need to join together whether it is government, corporate CSR, NGOs even startups and volunteers so we need to converge all our work program policies and skin and reach out to the stakeholders in a meaningful manner like assistive technology is another area so there are 21 different varieties of disabilities in the country nearly 10 crore population who are having one form or the other form disabilities and including starting from visually challenged to Parkinson's so in that case how assistive technologies in the form of talking books audio books even side language videos even braille speech to braille so those kind of help how startups can help us to do that because if we expect that everything only the government can do so India scale it is always a challenge every time so because 26 school children including higher education 33 children 1 crore and more teachers so the policy talks about continuous capacity building of every teacher for 50 hours every year so in that case how assistive technologies even the learning management systems and content management system in a better way they can help us to design learning and to track children even satisfy them and also credit transfer is possible since the policy talks about no hard separation so in a way and talks about multiple entry and exit so in that case how we can make such learning more and technology whether it is on campus using branding of first phase or digital like some of the speaker they talk about digital also digital and physical so how we can have a hybrid approach to reach out and in a time bound manner whether it is a teacher student, parent, children with special needs including a gifted child in the schooling system has every right to be nurtured and to be given double promotion or maybe nurturance with experts in the area of sports, games, science, technology, space so they need to be nurtured also so a multi-pronged strategy needs to be adopted so no concrete solution one set fit for all or one plan fit for all cannot do that. Thank you very much for giving the opportunity. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Professor Bahaira for sharing those insights so before we open the platform for audience Q&A one common question I would like to ask all of you because we're all sitting amidst the pandemic and with this how has the entire course which we developed the entire curriculum whether it's through experiential learning or theoretical has changed in the last two years I would like to hear insights from each one of you on the same so Professor Khanna would you like to start first. Yeah see at NIT University we are offering courses in computer science family electronics and communications engineering biotechnology and management so as it happens except for biotechnology and some labs in electronics and communications the computer science courses could be I mean they are very well suited for online delivery so in that sense we for the kind of courses we were offering the pandemic had not disturbed us so much because the biotechnology courses also there's a huge element of bioinformatics the way we offer them so there also I mean the effect was because as you know the education is in two ways one is the content so there's a formal education that happens through courses and everything but there's an informal education that's a major part that happens outside the classroom so that was completely missed so we could do justice with the content with the delivery but the impact was on the student I think they suffered I mean there's no way to hide behind this we have realized that this immersive learning coming to the campus and learning with your friends and in the classroom whether it's a computer science course or a mechanical engineering lab or a civil engineering lab which are no good require a lot of experiments physical experiments you see the quality that the student gets and the opportunities they get is heavily compromised you see so we did well in terms of giving them the skills that are required the professional skills but at a personality level a huge gap now and plus there was this huge effect of the pandemic itself on the way people think now in the people's personality and it was a huge shock so that intervention also has a huge role and there was nothing to absorb it people were left to their own devices devices the pun is intended and the family and there was no support system I mean the government of India did so much to have this Mano Darpan initiative and I mean that is the extent of the problem of the psychological problems and how people are going to grow up and what kind of individuals are we going to get after four years so that is remains to that has a huge gap there on the other hand you know NIT because it is a fully residential university so for us we could not do the things that we wanted to do but we will see the time is still with us the students are connected with us and it is not just four years that we remain connected to them later also so while the content wise the skill wise it was good because you know huge huge gap and we plan to make up for it thanks so that is a very valid point which I have mentioned Dr. Agarwal coming to you, your viewpoint yeah this is a very good insight actually you see that this we conduct mostly this of this distance learning program this online program so off campuses and that too for the parking professionals so here we appointed this AIMA council has appointed one task force under the chairmanship of Dr. Pramod Sinha and Prof. Rajan Saxena by including all the top academicians from India as well as from industry also this industry professionals and then we conducted a survey so this is what kind of this skills competency and what kind of changes are taking place so first thing which we find it out to be noticed that this hybrid mode this is going to be a reality in coming time so then definitely the kind of this advantage which we are having in this online learning that we have to include within this hybrid system this is the first thing we have noticed so through and then secondly this industry there is a transformation in industry industry is towards digitization impact of this industry for revolution is very much there the nature and character of the jobs are changing yesterday we did a webinar with the IIT professors for launching a program and with industry people so we and that to focus on digitization digitization and transformation of enterprises and organization so we notice that currently what industry is looking industry is looking along with long term courses this MBA program and all but major emphasis is on the short term programs this is what that six months program three months programs or even one year program one year program and three months program and back to in a focused area this is AI this is MIE this is design thinking this is this is this transformation of this of enterprises this is this consultancy this belongs this consultancy the consultancy program so this program became very very popular so in these kind of programs even not in private sector but in this government sector this we have a collaboration with World Bank and then we are launching launching this programs on this procurement we are launching program on this contractual dispute management we are launching program on public private partnership we find that there is a overwhelming response from government government officers there is overwhelming response from public sector enterprises and as well as from private sector in these kind of programs and definitely there is no doubt that this long term program like this PGDM 2 years program so as Professor Khanna was rightly pointed out that here we have to struggle very hard what is the what is what we learned out of the research survey which is going to be released on 30th March by the education minister what we learned that you see that even in this full time even in this 2 years program there is a need there is a need to align it completely with the requirement of industry industry and definitely this is what that this this we are going to align with the requirement of industry whether this is offline so definitely this is going to give us a tremendous advantage. Thank you coming to you Mr. Anish since we were all our panelists about their viewpoint and how the last 2 years have changed the course curriculum because of COVID and how the entire theoretical and experiential learning is being re-looked and being redefined by institutes so what to hear from you what are your viewpoints. I think it's a it's a great transformation that my company went through because we were conducting a sort of a hybrid teaching and learning experience across 21 of our learning centers in India pre-pandemic and when the lockdown was announced in about 48 hours we moved this entire operation consisting of thousands of students both in the employability sector as well as in the upskilling sector into a completely online learning management system and while I completely agree with Professor Khanna on the challenges that were there I think one of the things that my faculty and my managers were very cognizant about was the level of engagement that we needed with the students while delivering an online program and I think given the very object oriented sort of programs that we are running most of our programs are very specific to a can you work in a bank or can you work in an IT environment or if you're a working professional can you acquire the specific skill so we were able to really mix and match our theory practice with a lot of experiential learning and we were also able to engage with our employer partners and in that sense as I said we were a multi-sided platform so we were able to get the employer partners to provide a bit of an on-the-job training to our people while they were going through the curriculum itself so I think these things make a big impact because you know if you're looking at a real-life application of your learning while you learn I think there cannot be a better way of handling this also with our IIM and IIT partners we are one of the large attack players in this space we were able to compensate for a lot of the on-campus immersions that were part of the course curriculum we were able to compensate with hackathons that my team conducted we were able to ensure that there was as far as possible no lack of skill focus no lack of application focus during the course of course the challenge of you know not being able to physically interact and not being able to get the kind of peer-to-peer experiences that you would have in a physical learning environment those challenges remain I think that post-pandemic there would be a reemergence of a hybrid learning environment where there would be opportunities for students to at least occasionally meet interact with their peers as well as with their professors while continuing to consume a lot of the learning in an online world and I think that's a healthy balance going forward that we will look forward to Amitra thank you coming to you Dr. Venika would you unmute yourself when the lockdown was declared in March 2020 very important was shifting from offline to online and digital hub that was already ready which was effectively developed we could use that and we declared and informed to the students there will be no lockdown for learning at Barthi Vidya beta and fortunately with the 7-tire counseling and 5-tire feedback system we were constantly in touch with the students and what was very important was the communication because in this pandemic very very important the was that we wanted our students to be physically featured mentally balanced and well prepared to face the future challenges particularly in this so we ensured not only the curriculum curriculum fortunately it is well designed we have many electives from marketing finance HR business analytics to digital marketing HR analytics and what industry needs the important thing what we did is considering the requirement of the industry we focused on the skill development and we approached we were approached by edX a platform which offers the online courses from Harvard to Oxford to IM and IITs so we immediately joined hands with the edX and we offered the online skill development courses which was free for that time and many of our students immediately joined because upskilling and upgrading their skill was very very very very important and we focused more on the add-on courses value-ordered courses the MOOCs and particularly this edX came to our rescue and we very importantly particularly the where all the activities it was a blessing and desire if we have to invite the international guests or the professors from different parts of the world in the offline mode it is very difficult because it costs a lot there are so many permissions their availability but what we did we took it as an opportunity and we had many international conferences international webinars and we had faculty from Rome to Canada to Australia to US and we got them online and we could give excellent inputs online to the students similarly alumna connect international connect industry connect is very important for any visitor so what we did even the alumna who are different parts of the world so we could connect them and they were readily available coming to entrepreneurship there again our one to one because we have identified excellent entrepreneurs who are very successful we identified them we requested them online to guide our students to go for the entrepreneurship and many of our students could take the advantage and the entrepreneurs as well so the blessing and disguise particularly the international online programs and all that we did and as a result of all this you will be surprised the placements were not at all affected we got everybody many of them went for the entrepreneurship and this is how it has helped so we are going to make the blended learning because now the future is of blended learning whether you go for the offline or online and all that blended has to be there and the effective use of this we have to do so that students are skilled enough and future ready so thank you thank you professor your view point before we move to audience Q&A thank you very much actually when covid approached in March 2020 we were running in MTRT only one channel for the school education sector and only radio channels we were running for the whole country one of the the government in May lost the prime minister seat with the program so I did one platform provide all digital content related professor Panhera your voice is breaking a lot and the digital education is concerned can you hear me yes yeah we can hear you now hello okay sorry very connectivity issue can you hear me so we started 12 TV channels as one class one channel and for each class up to class 10 we had two hours and it is repeated 11 times for children so that any time conveniently they can watch because we cannot force them to watch in a particular time and besides that we had large use of radio even community lot of community radio stations around 80 radio stations and 132 radio station all together 230 radio stations across the country we used ensuring that it reaches to whole population geographical location to 230 radio stations we are feeding besides that Dixia a large number around 6000 videos 3000 audios we developed class wise subject wise and populated on Dixia and the same content were available on TV and radio as coherent access content there is noise in the background hello so that is why we used Dixia also and more than 6000 videos and 3000 audios through our partners like we had a partnership with rotary India and they provided a large number of content also as part of partnership and similarly children with special services we needed to develop the content so that is why we collaborated with Indian sign language institute in collaboration with them and to start with class 1 to 5 we thought that if it is primary level is the address so we did for them and all ntrt books they developed in 3 digital forms e-pop, flip book and pdf so the e-pops helped the visually challenged child to listen to ntrt book even we had a partnership with google for collaborating to work with google assistant and digitize all text books and provide through google assistant so that children can listen to the book at the same time as also ntrt developed the digital education guideline and also guideline for philosophy and security because there were lot many teachers teachers educators they were using that so these steps were taken and popularized also and continuous so there is a lot of network issue so you can conclude at this point in the pandemic situation we were supposed to scale 42 lakh thank you doctor Professor Bahaira okay so continuous capacity building of teachers was a challenge it was through Disha so through Disha thank you alright thank you everyone for your time we are running quite short on time so that's why we will have to conclude the session thank you for being with us today and showing the path forward for the education industry forward over to you Bhavna thank you so much Vanita and thank you to our panelists so we request all our panelists to please stay around as we call the final set of awards and we'd love to have an applause from your side as well as we encourage all the winners to join us so could we have the preset please well the first one which is the best ed tech solution of the year and that goes to congratulations to the entire team and with this let's move on to the next one please the best learning platform in performing arts music dance drama goes to Cray play congratulations to the entire team as we applaud and acknowledge their efforts with this if I may request Dushan the co-founder to kindly join us thank you so much entrepreneur India for this honor Cray play operates as a digital digital stage equipping over 10,000 K-12 students with critical communication skills through theater and storytelling we're thrilled to receive this award and which will I'm sure motivate us further to continue on our mission of enabling every student to find their voice and stage their stories through theater and storytelling I dedicate this award to the entire Cray play community my co-founder and the founding team all my early stage partners our school associates and students friends and family who have been with us through thick and thin thank you once again entrepreneur India for this wonderful honor thank you congratulations Dushan to you and your entire team well with this let's move on to the next one it is the most interactive program by a preschool and that goes to mind a seed congratulations to the entire team let's move on and find out who gets the next win well as you can see on the screen best employability award and that goes to times professional learning private limited with this congratulations to the entire team may I request Anisha Sri Krishna CEO of times professional learning private limited to kindly join us do we have Anish joining us well I believe in case that has to happen we go to the person I can see Anish actually on the back end Anish if you can hear us would you like to unmute all right let's just move on to the next precent please yes the most emerging higher education institute of the year and that goes to plaksha university well congratulations to the entire team and with this let's move on and find out the next win the best college of the year and that goes to saint paul's college well congratulations to the saint paul's college and could I request doctor thomas mj principal saint paul's college to kindly join us yeah thank you thank you for comforting the best college award to saint paul's college this is such a proud moment for all of us at saint paul's college as we receive this recognition just in the fifth year of the institution and I would like to humbly acknowledge the support and contribution of every state college of this institution the management staff parents and students who constantly support and for striving to live and promote the values and principles of that this institution holds high and for constantly realizing the motto of the institution that is creating professionals for a better tomorrow and we look forward to your continued support and encouragement and as we believe together we can achieve greater greater heights in the coming years once again thank you entrepreneur India for holding this education innovation awards and from saint paul's college we wish the entire entrepreneur India all the very best thank you thank you and congratulations well with this let's move on and find out the final two winners in this set could we have the next preset please the best testing and assessment solution of the year and that goes to infinity learn by three chaitanya classes but congratulations to the entire team and may I request Priya Darshani S.K. head of communications to kindly join us thank you Babna and thank you Ritu for providing us this opportunity and congratulations to entrepreneur India as a whole team to putting up a stellar show today and you know the event is very commendable to bring in the whole you know entire strata of the industry on one kind of a photo having said that infinity learn is a protege of Sri chaitanya which is a 36 year old you know largest educational group of Asia and within six months of our existence you know we have done some belligerent steps vis-a-vis to you know reach out to students today the platform has 10,000 students coming every week to pursue various kind of things well known for you know catering to the professional courses we have started with the test perhaps and you know the assessment kind of a platform but we also give out a holistic kind of a supplement education from school we're not an online school but you know definitely definitely moving into that direction and with all the kind of encouragements that we have received I bet we're just on the green trajectory so thank you so much and congratulations right thank you and congratulations Priyadarshani on that wonderful win to you on your entire team well for the final award in this let's find it out as you can see on the screen institute with the best placement and that goes to NIIT well congratulations to NIIT on that wonderful win with this ladies in general it was the final award in this set we'd like to really humbly congratulate all the winners and as we have punita on the screen punita your words of congratulations to all the winners whilst we go ahead with our final talk who do you thank you thank you Babna and very many congratulations to all the winners and for rising the next chapter in education thank you thank you and congratulations Doctor Raj I believe he's on mute no worries you want from me you are dissing me yes yes nothing nothing so any which way a little bit tight on time so but thank you for your presence and thank you and congratulations to all the winners congratulations thank you thank you thank you well with this ladies and gentlemen an event so great like this and in the presence of Mr. Ritu Maria who's you know been so patient from the very start it is time for the closing remarks well for this we're elated to be joined by Doctor Neeta Varma Director General National Informatics Centre NEITY Government of India Doctor Neeta is the Director General of National Informatics Centre a premier science and technology organisation of the Government of India with a career spanning over three and a half decades she's been somebody who's been instrumental in implementing high impact digital initiatives across the country with this we'd like to humbly welcome on behalf of Fonsbunna India Doctor Neeta Varma Doctor Neeta could we now have you on the screen please good morning everyone it is my pleasure to address an August gathering of professionals from the education and technology sectors as I contemplate the significance of education I recall a story from Japan that surfaced in 2016 a railway station that was set to close due to low passenger count was kept operational and it is realised that it was being used by one girl for travelling to her school the station was closed only after she graduated such is the significance of education that the global communities acknowledge education plays a pivotal role in development of the country in every aspect be it social, cultural moral or economic development education seems to protect poor and marginalised from exploitation by generating awareness about their rights their capacities and their capabilities it also helps them in economic upliftment by making them employable but above all education empowers the people, enables them to make choices, take informed decisions about themselves helps them dream big evolve from job seeker to job giver aspire to be an entrepreneur like many of you in the audience today education therefore is a core area of public policy national as well as international deliberations Minerial development goals to sustainable development goals of united nations have education as an important dimension while daily development goals focused on universal primary education sustainable development goals talk about quality education likewise countries have their policies to support their educational institutions their teachers as well as support their students universalisation of education is one common theme across all these policies in India education government of India is working towards enhancing the access to affordable and quality education to more and more children various schemes launched by the ministry are directed towards providing universal education to universal access to education for all segments of society some of them include Samagra Shriksha Abhyan Prime Minister Potion Scheme Rajasthriya Uchittar Shriksha Abhyan Unnad Bharat Abhyan etc and on the other side there are programs such as National Digital Literacy Mission Pradhan Mantri Gram Digital Saksharta Abhyan in Digital India these programs are empowering the citizens by training them to operate computers and digital devices lot of schemes are also in operation to motivate children to come to school in the early years through incentives in the form of midday meal scholarships uniforms and books in India lots of volunteer organization, foundations not for profits are also very active to promote the cause of education all these initiatives had a significant impact over the years on our education ecosystem but we still have a long way to go there are gaps in quality of education learning outcomes across geographies access to affordable and quality education is the goal affordability and quality often do not go together and therefore large number of children from smaller towns children from poor and marginalized sections are deprived of quality education we all have seen significance of child education in our families parents make so many sacrifices to afford good school or good tuition for their children children will shift from small towns to school simplicities stay in hostel to get quality education same is true for engineering and medical entrance coaching there are pockets in cities like Delhi where the students stay to prepare for their entrance exams and then there are cities like Kota all of this have a lot of financial stress on the family and emotional stress on the children and the fact is very few kids can even afford this so the challenge is how do you provide quality education at an affordable cost at a scale as I said quality and affordability offer do not go together but the good news is technology enables us to move on this convergence role of technology in education was realized long ago however our digital infrastructure at that time was not ready to leverage this potential launch of digital India program by honorable prime minister in 2015 propelled the growth of broadband network in the country mobile users also grew exponentially this opened up a huge opportunity to solve the long pending problem of universal access to quality education further induction of technology in our day to day operations introduction of AI machine learning automation boards started changing the profile of employable skills thus need for re-skilling existing professionals existing workforce also became a necessity this all led to a large number of startups and other companies focusing on the domain and thus gave rise to tech industry in India I am told India is one of the top 3-4 countries in the world as far as tech companies and startups are concerned India also has emerged to be among the top 3 countries in the world after China and United States to get the most funding in the sector tech industry was beginning to make inroads in our conventional schooling but largely supplementing school education COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns led to the physical closer of 15 lakh schools that has affected more than 26 crore students for almost 2 years with small interventions in between like in all walks of life we remain the only choice for continuum of education the pandemic had promoted had prompted education institutions teachers, students and parents to embrace online learning like never before several tech companies across India have been have risen to the challenge and lots of new platforms features on existing platforms to support virtual online classrooms were launched during pandemic and it is strongly felt the demand for education platforms virtual classrooms and its other avatars will continue to grow in the times to come primarily because cost of online education is lower when compared to traditional education that means going to school or college there are numerous e-learning platforms already available for students where they can access to quality education at an affordable cost because of the affordability factor students from different socio-acronomic backgrounds can get access to quality education from best of teachers for the new education new national education policy 2020 aims to integrate technology at every level of instruction online learning got a major push on the national education policy that promotes online education to achieve the 50% gross enrollment ratio commit of India had also set up platforms like Swayam and Dixia to promote online learning in the country Swayam is designed to take the best teaching learning resources to all including the most disadvantaged Swayam enables students to access all the courses taught in classrooms from class 9 to class 8 to class 9 Dixia is a national platform for school education that can be accessed by learners and teachers across the country and is available in different languages and cuts across syllabus of NCRT, CBSC and some state boards as well another dimension which brings a lot of promise for a tech sector is the growing internet user base there are around internet users in India which is much larger than collective population of quite a few countries in the world having said this there are challenges also because we still have around 300 to 400 million people who have to be connected who have to be brought on the internet who have to be able to afford the smartphones to be able to take benefit of these online courses and digital education but the good point is that but the good point is that with the announcement by Honourable Prime Minister that Fival will reach to 600,000 villages of India soon having a stable connection and with Atmura Bharat getting affordable phones will soon it looks to be reality in the near future. Now when we bring once we have access and we have been able to provide access to these online courses to children across urban and rural areas then there are then there will be new kind of challenges which we have to face or I should say there are new kind of opportunities which will come the first is the content at tech is not only about technology it has content plays a very major role in this and when you bring and in this making this content available in different Indian languages in different dialects is a domain which still needs to be which still has lot of work to be done it can but the good point is that in India we have large number of good educators and teachers and teaching is considered to be a noble profession and we should leverage on this scenario and really bring all these teachers and leverage their potential to create this content in different languages quickly we also have option of using technology solutions for this though such language technologies have matured in many foreign languages and some of the Indian languages but large number of Indian languages still need to be to be refined the solution needs to be refined to be able to do a machine translation but having said this is also an opportunity where a lot of work can happen in making this content available because that is one of the core area where at tech industry has to work to make this content available in different languages in India to make it truly inclusive or to make that ambition or our vision of universal access to education and reality then going forward going forward so far largely the focus of the education has been on the school education and then the skills of professional courses which for re-skilling purposes but there are a lot of other domains where we have started seeing some startups really coming into this but there is a huge scope in that area things like gamification of education application of AR and VR technology to make learning an enjoyable experience particularly when we talk of concepts or when it talks of learning the skills it's going to be very very useful so that's another domain where a lot of work still needs to be done or we should say it's a work in progress lastly the true power of online learning or digital technologies in education will come where we can make education as a personalized phenomena basis because every child is unique every child will have his own set of understandings his own set of context from where he or she is coming therefore we need to personalize education to really maximize the learning outcome of that and with the kind of new set of technologies I am sure there are a lot of startups who are working in this area and who are building algorithms who may already have algorithms to achieve this thing but now I think question is that how do we really bring them on scale so that every child every individual gets benefited by this and it has a huge potential of improving the learning outcome as well and I feel once we achieve this this will also democratize education in true sense and help us meet our objective of universal access to affordable access to quality education for all as they say there is no better gift than education and therefore I would like to compliment all of you for your commitment your dedication to build solution to impart quality education to every child a dream we as a country have been aspiring for long so I salute your commitment and your dedication to this domain I also would like to thank entrepreneur India for inviting me to this and giving me this opportunity to talk to all of you and wish all the best for future for further deliberations thank you well thank you so much ma'am for that incredible closing remark Dr. Neeta Varma ladies and gentlemen this brings us to the end of the second virtual edition of the education innovation summit in awards 2022 organized by entrepreneur India it was an honor hosting and we would like to once again thank the partners and sponsors also you may share your feedback with us directly on marketing at the rate entrepreneurindia.com or to any of our editors you can mail it on behalf of Ritya Maria and her team at entrepreneur India and shout out to all the team members who contributed in making this summit and awards a success well for now this is me Bhavna Bhatia for today and we hope to see you in future of our events at entrepreneur India please do follow us on our social media handles and stay tuned with our upcoming events thank you all for joining us