If you had thought that entrepreneurship is all about starting up read this story where two young turks turned back from a lucrative corporate career to pick up a 25-year old not-for-profit organization and start growing it. Of course applying all the modern management they picked up during their brief stint in multinationals.
AISECT (All India Society for Electronics and Computer Technology) was started by Santosh Kumar Choubey in 1985 primarily to encourage exchange of knowledge in the new and emerging fields of electronics and later in computer technology. It later transformed into vocational training institute. Soon educational institutions emerged and a tie-up with SBI in the field of financial inclusion followed. 25 years later, Choubey's son and daughter-in-law duo came back from a thriving corporate career to take the mantle of building the AISECT group of institutions. In a rare deviation, Dare caught up with the husband-wife team to capture the spirit behind their endeavour.
Education has changed rural India
Headquartered out of Bhopal AISECT today is a house-hold name in the rural vocational training and employment generation.
Siddharth Chaturvedi: Education touches the lives of every citizen. Everyone has a point of view on what standards should be adapted. Education is the next category after food and retail that draws the largest spending in India. We have to deal with high expectations from our customers.
The kind of satisfaction you find when you are visiting the block level where students don't have any option but your brand and facility is something unmatched. This keeps us going back to the field.
Pallavi Rao Chaturvedi: We are focusing on bringing quality of education where is it not available. In a way we become the hub; the clearinghouse of ideas. as a result we become responsible and empower our students.
We have to ensure that the service is the same to the end customer. Standardization of the system across our centers is a challenge. Sometimes language differences come in the way; difference in awareness may also hinder. A set of guidelines alone won't help us.
However, Pallavi says they does not want to straight-jacket its centers. "No two centers need to be identical. We want the locals to manage the centers. We do trainings and workshops. We have a detailed operations manual covering decor, working hours and field forces. We have a field-force of 85 people across the country."
AISECT has 8,500 franchisee centers in 27 states. The presence is higher in MP, Gujarat, Chatthisgarh and Himachal Pradesh. Recently, southern states have seen a surge. Typically, they are 5-6 years ahead in the learning curve.
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