‘By P. Sarojini’
Chennai (CWBN)_ Sridhar Vembu, the cofounder of Zoho Corporation is in Tamil Nadu now experimenting with starting new rural schools in the villages of Tamil Nadu. He has set up his office and home at Mathalamparai village near Tenkasi. In the current lockdown situations, he has come up with an experiment of ‘a rural school start-up’, which will provide free education and food to the village students. He said that this new start-up will be a model that doesn’t believe in marks, degrees, affiliations for certificates or any credentials that the current education is following.
Sridhar Vembu, despite being a billionaire and the cofounder of Zoho corporation who was valued by Forbes at $2.5 billion, came up with an unusual decision of moving into a small village near Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu in 2019 where he set up his office and home. He says that he is enjoying his current life as a teacher moving around the village in his cycle with the traditional dress veshti.
Vembu said he started off with taking tuition classes to three children in his spare time at home which now ended up with four teachers and 52 students who are children of farm laborers of the village. He said that he would like take it to the next level “a rural school start-up”. He added that he will pay serious attention to this project now and that he is doing part-time teaching too. Moreover, they are trying to put it together as a model now and busy with preparing papers, getting necessary approvals, etc.
On researching the past, Vembu has already been into this service over the past decade. His Zoho University, part of Zoho Corporation, has already helped the dropouts of class 10, 11 and 12 to become IT professionals in his own firm and others. Hence, this isn’t a new venture to Vembu.
Challenge
But this time the challenge is different. He said dealing directly with the village students is pretty much difficult, the main reason being poverty. He said “On the ground, what I see is poverty. I noticed that kids coming to our tuition center are actually hungry. How can you learn anything when you are hungry? That has to be sorted. I appreciate the noon-meal scheme but that is not enough”. He added that his school provides two meals a day and snacks in the evening before children are sent home.
He explained the problems faced by the village students regarding their online classes in the current lockdown conditions. He said practically it was not possible for many students to attend online classes due to lack of smart phones and internet facilities. He added “I had enough time, and we did some physical experiments, I taught them a little Science, Mathematics and English”.
Vembu, who is active in Twitter, wrote “Within few days, my social distanced open air class swelled from three kids to 25 and kids got unruly and I was struggling (smiley) and realised how hard it is to be a teacher”.
On studying the mentality of the village students, he said there are different categories of students among the rural poor. Some really want to get credentials and many others who are actually planning to drop out at one point, after Class 8 or 10 and retaining the dropouts is quite a challenge. Vembu said the real start-up challenge that he faced with village children was classifying them. He said classifying them according to what they know is far better than segregating by age, pointing out to the grade 7 children who doesn’t know English alphabets.
Vembu talked about the other challenges that exists for the village children. The main being teachers do not live in the villages. They come from far away towns of 30-40 km away. The affordable parents and teachers send their kids to private schools. Apart from this, the poverty, alcoholism and poorest children landing up at government schools and less facilities are some other challenges to overcome.
Vembu pointed out that credentialism is the root cause of this problem. Many students focus only on the credentials they get rather than the knowledge they acquire. There are nontraditional learners who are actually brilliant but do not show up in exams. Our education system should accommodate then too. Vembu said that the policies made by the state and central government with good intentions get diluted when they reach villages. “There is not enough ground talent to do the implementation,” he said.
Zoho clocked an operational revenue of INR 3,300 crore in the financial year 2018-2019. Before the rural schools, Zoho opened numerous rural offices in the villages of Tamil Nadu during the lockdown to take back their software engineers.
According to Vembu, his only demand was to set up offices in rural areas. Deciding on the location, he has planned to open ten offices in the coming months in the villages of Tamil Nadu, Andhra and Kerala with each seating capacity of 100 people.
Finally, Vembu said that he has made many friends at Mathalamparai village visiting the tea shops and playing cricket with children. He said they are curious but very warm and friendly to a stranger.
The corporate businessman’s new start-up is appreciable and this calls for a discussion and attention on our current education system and the challenges faced by our village students in continuing their studies especially in the present lockdown conditions. Hope this step of Sridhar Vembu will inspire many to involve in such service activities.
