An alumnus of IIM, Bangalore and St Stephen’s, a visionary who has led CL’s dramatic growth from a one-man startup to one of Asia’s leading education corporate. He has trained thousands of students, teachers and corporate executives. Satya Narayana R, Founder and Chairman, Career Launcher and Indus World School shares his insight on various aspects of education in India.
Please share the genesis of Indus World School.
The journey of Indus World began in 2005. The rules and law in India makes it an arduous task to open a new school but the journey of our School has been quantitatively challenging and qualitatively rewarding.
What is the USP of your group?
The group realises that teaching a nursery student today has its impact on the individual and society for the next 50 years. The responsibility of the schools is to be able to dig into their imagination and devise a system which is wired into today’s world rather than being a photocopy of the past. The Indus World School’s prime focus is on delivering quality education through dynamic classroom practices and new teacher capacity building practices to be able to provide an education to the students which is wired into the future.
How do you ensure quality is maintained across all Indus World schools?
The group continuously invents and reinvents its policies and teaching methodology by understanding the need of the area in which the school is operational. Maintaining the quality of the schools is an operationally intensive, day-night continuous improvement job. Education imparted at various locations across India has to be improvised according to the area and the same framework does not apply to all the institutions.
Do you have any plans to expand the group in coming years?
The group has a vision to establish schools across India. However, keeping in mind the availability of limited financial resources, we devised three models of partnerships to expand the group. The three models include: Infra partner, the school land and building is owned by the individual and is leased to the Indus world Group and the running of the school is undertaken by the group without any interference of the infra partner. The second model is where the group owns the land, the building and is involved in the running of the school. There are three schools which are wholly owned by the group. The third model is the Education Partner where the owner of the school has to have a strong educational background and a willingness to improvise and improve upon the structure provided by Indus group. The content and manuals and training is provided by the Indus group for an education partner. In addition to the above models, we have an embedded system in all the schools to maintain high quality standards in the schools spread across India.
What are the challenges of opening schools in India?
The major challenge is to gather finance and get approvals to set up and run the schools. Relentless effort goes behind getting regulations approved in order to start a new institution. The people with the right attitude also suffer cause of the humongous effort required to get the requisitive approvals and that system has to eventually change.
