PUNE:
An entrepreneurial lab for social innovation has been set up on Sunday
at the International Centre of Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU).
It has received funding of Rs10 lakh from the European Union (EU) to
start operations and is only the country's fourth such lab to receive
financial benefits from the EU.
Vijay Khare, director of the International Centre at SPPU, said,
"The lab has been established for budding entrepreneurs from the
university. Innovative ideas that will give solutions to problems
related to the daily needs of people in society would be encouraged
through it."
The two objectives of the lab are boosting social innovation and entrepreneurship.
The international project, which has been approved by the EU, will
be called Social Innovation for Local Indian and Israeli Communities and
Graduate Entrepreneurs (SILICE).
Among foreign universities, the Tel-Hai Academic College in Israel, University of Edinburgh in Britain, the Technical University of Berlin
in Germany, the University of Applied Science from Croatia and the
University of Lisbon in Portugal have received funding from the EU to
set up start-up labs.
This project is a partnership between
institutions of higher education located in Israel, Europe, and India.
The project aims to establish Centres for Social Innovation
that will give students and workers tools for initiating, planning and
implementing innovative and creative social business projects.
Khare said, "We will concentrate on
solar energy and alternative energy sources, the clean India campaign
and manual scavenging to bring out solutions from this lab. An
alternative technology to eradicate manual scavenging will be our
priority."
Gharda libarary at Bandra in Mumbai.(Satish Bate/HT Photo)
I almost missed it. Walking down Hill Road, Bandra, where you can spend more in a restaurant than at the fashion stalls outside it, there are enough distractions. I nearly glossed over a billboard advertising a lecture that took place the day before.
But the venue seemed interesting – a library right on Hill Road, a few steps from Elco Arcade. You’re forgiven if you didn’t know about it either. The Bai Ratanbai Gharda Memorial Library is in the basement of Gharda House, a glass-fronted, nondescript building obscured by hawkers and kiosks.
THE PLACE
Walk in and you’ll realise it’s a treat for book lovers. The 10-year-old library is air-conditioned, spotless (none of the dustiness you’d associate with book collections), and contains more than 10,500 titles. Bharati Banerjee, the librarian, says between 600 and 800 new books are added annually.
There are thrillers, bestsellers, literary classics and the usual get-smart, grow-rich, expand-business books. But if you want to let your mind wander, this is the place. I found art and linguistics books (finally!), huge sections on medicine and world history (more than World Wars!), the complete Lonely Planet series (hurrah!), volumes of poetry and hard-to-find guides to world religion. There are biographies of everyone from Bill Clinton, Richard Wagner and Mao to Kiran Bedi, Nehru and Tilak.
THE MAN
The library has been set up by a man whose own story would make great reading. Dr Keki Gharda, 88-year-old scientist and Padma Shri, grew up in Bandra, attended St Stanislaus school down the street and is one of India’s brightest minds in chemistry.
He started off humbly, creating chemical reagents at home and supplying them to Elphinstone College, where he studied. His first job was manufacturing blue dyes in his 2,000 square-foot rented shed in Vakola in 1964. But something about an imported dye, phthalogen brilliant blue, popularly called German Blue, and used in school uniforms, gave him an idea. Gharda realised it was possible not only recreate the dye, but make it stronger. The new version came to be called Gharda Blue, and, if you’ll pardon the pun, fast caught on.
His company moved to agrochemicals in the 1970s, developing a faster, safer and cheaper way to produce a herbicide than a Swiss company. The method is now called the Indian Process – and the company is one of the largest producers of the chemical.
Think of him when you look at an Apple product. Gharda developed a polymer that keeps iPhones from overheating. Rare for a chemicals manufacturer, he’s not patented any of his unique processes, sharing it with the world.
The library honours his mother, who loved reading. It has 250 members, which is good news for you. The books you want will likely be available, you can browse in peace, and it’s a good reason to be distracted on Hill Road.
CHECK IT OUT
WHERE: Bai Ratanbai Gharda Memorial Library, Gharda House, Hill Road, near Elco Arcade, Bandra (W)
TIMINGS: Monday-Saturday 10 am to 8 pm.
MEMBERSHIP: Rs 1,000 annually (plus a refundable deposit of Rs 500). There are discounts for students and senior citizens.
Cuckoo Clocked: Can an app make you a better birder?
Cornell Lab’s Merlin app is coming to India. They’re crowdsourcing images from local birdwatchers, and everyone’s aflutter.
The Merlin Bird ID app has changed birding in North America in the four years since its launch, helping novices identify species in seconds, from a single photo.(Image Courtesy Cornell Lab)
In theory, it sounds perfect. You spot a bird in the wild (or on the windowsill of your concrete jungle), take a quick shot with your smartphone, and an app identifies the species in seconds with 90% accuracy.
For those who’ve used it, four-year-old Merlin Bird ID has revolutionised birdwatching. But the app, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Caltech, using crowdsourced photographs, is perhaps better known for how academia, machine learning and crowdsourced data can collaborate towards conservation. In North America, where it was launched, it’s allowed ordinary folks to identify birds without bulky field guides or long-drawn-out Google searches. Among established birdwatching groups, it’s cut down endless debates on which bird was spotted. Naturalists the world over have been using the data to understand migratory patterns, habitat changes and other avian issues.
In January, the Cornell Lab announced plans to extend the app for birds in India – a decision that is as exciting as it is daunting. India ranks among the world’s 12 megadiversity nations, with 1,266 or 13% of the world’s bird species. But for Merlin to identify Indian birds, it needs more than 500 reference photos for every species. Local birders have been urged to contribute their pictures to build the database.
Some birds like the bright blue verditer flycatcher are easy enough – contributions have already crossed 750. Others like the blue-yellow Banasura Laughingthrush are so rare, there are only seven pictures uploaded.
India’s birdwatching community is divided over the use of tech-driven tools like bird-identification apps. Some say it will popularise the hobby. Others fear it will become a distraction, reducing the activity to almost a game. (Pramod Thakur / HT File Photo)
SPREADING WINGS
Mohit Aggarwal, 31, a bank executive who has lived in several cities and is now based in Mumbai, has contributed over 100 images, most of rare species. “I’ve focused on filling the gaps left by other contributors,” says the birder.
He hopes the app will soothe the ruffled feathers of India’s birding community. “A unique sighting usually causes controversy,” he says. Older birdwatchers, who’ve been bird-spotting before digital cameras, tend to be dismissive, even disbelieving, of younger enthusiasts’ pictures, he says. “Photos offer proof that a certain bird has been in an unlikely region. When a picture is up for identification, you’re typically up against someone’s ego. Machine learning may be able to answer without bias.”
For Albin Jacob, 36, a software engineer from Bengaluru, contributing more than 3,000 pictures was a breeze. He’s photographed more than 800 species across India and is a reviewer for the India portal of Ebird, Cornell Lab’s massive crowdsourced database of bird observations.
“I’m excited that the app will be available for India,” he says.
AEON Learning offers online education platforms for working professionals encompassing both higher education and technology skill upgradation.
At a glance
Startup: AEON Learning
Founders: Karthik KS, Sankar Bora, Vikalp Jain and Rahul Jain
Year it was founded: 2013
Where it is based: Bengaluru
Sector: Edtech
Problem it solves: Provides online education
Funding raised: $6.5 million
In a fast-paced world where growth and development take place in a blink of an eye, keeping abreast with the goings-on in your industry becomes most crucial. Hence, online education has become one of the booming sectors in India. With the increasing internet penetration and the euphoria of Digital India, online education is expected to grow manifolds. It has witnessed a significant acceptance among working professionals in the last couple of years.
Contributing to the growth is a Bengaluru-based startup AEON Learning. It is an online education platform for busy young working professionals, encompassing both higher education and technology skill upgradation. AEON Learning, through its platforms Avagmah and Acadgild, helps professionals upgrade their skills and capabilities to remain relevant in today’s rapidly evolving employment market.
Founded by Karthik KS along with his friend Sankar Bora, in November 2013, Aeon eventually acquired Acadgild, another edtech company founded by Vikalp Jain and Rahul Jain in 2014. The duo later joined AEON after the acquisition. Vikalp is President at AEON Learning and Rahul Jain continues to be Head of Engineering.
From brick and mortar to online
Karthik, who has 23 years of experience in the education sector, says, “With millions of working professionals aspiring to compete with their global counterparts they need to continuously upgrade themselves. AEON Learning was started to meet this opportunity by helping reputed universities in delivering quality contemporary education via technology and internet.”
The Government of India had announced that it was targeting to increase the Gross Enrolment Ratio in Higher Education (GER) from 23 percent to 30 percent. “We knew that educating millions more of young Indians to achieve this number could not be done without using technology, as the existing brick-and-mortar education system was already over packed. The only clear solution to build scale and address the issue of quality was by implementing technology. That is when we knew we had this fantastic opportunity of powering existing universities to go online and use existing faculty to reach a larger base of students across geographies to help India reach its GER target,” Karthik explains.
AEON claims to have reached 22,000 students across 66 countries, with 20 percent business originating from the US.
Engagement-driven
Talking about the challenges while starting up, Karthik explains, “One of the key challenges we faced was that our solution was way ahead of the market. Our core offering then was for institutes and universities to offer their courses online. The online education industry in India was still in its infancy and the only popular medium for anyone who wanted to reskill themselves was through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The nature in which MOOCs were designed didn't really suit the Indian consumers as they are built on self-learning model and thus suffered high rate of students dropping out. Finding innovative, differentiated solutions to these problems became our main focus.”
Using technology as the core strength, the founders developed a learning platform that could replicate classroom learning in the digital world and further improve on it. Built on the principles of engagement, interaction and motivation, the core objective was to replicate the classroom environment.
The startup today offers student acquisition, engagement, retention, online content development, delivery of programmes, support, and analytics services, as well as programmes for marketing, finance, human resource management, and other related courses.
Avagmah partners with universities and offers access to quality education for working professionals. The universities use the Avagmah technology platform to help them reach out to a large audience through technology, with the platform enabling marketing, student counselling, enrolment, virtual classroom, student engagement, retention and more. Some of the universities and institutes on the platform include IIM Bangalore, Pondicherry University, NMIMS Mumbai, AIMA and Institute of Metro and Rail Technology (IMRT) among others.
Acadgild offers working professionals a platform to develop ready-to-deploy skills in new-age areas like programming, design and analytics. Acadgild’s hybrid education model brings together the intensity and rigour of the classroom with the convenience of technology, offering live sessions led by industry mentors. Acadgild offers relevant programmes like ones on data science, big data, blockchain, data analytics, and more.
AEON Learning has over 35+ corporate partners who have been upskilling and reskilling their employees on the platforms. Some of these partners include Infosys, Oracle, Cognizant, Abbott, MaxLife among others.
Founder backgrounds
The firm currently has a team size of 140 people.
Karthik KS, 52, completed his engineering from NIT Kurukshetra and Management from Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, New Delhi. Previously, he had started 24x7 Learning, an edtech company offering e-learning solutions to corporates, and prior to that he was managing Microland’s education division – MicroUniv.
Vikalp Jain, 43, is Co-founder and President, who completed his B Tech from IIT Bombay. Prior to AEON Learning, Vikalp co-founded MOZVO, a social movie rating site, and was the CTO of FlipClass.
Sankar Bora, 40, who is Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at AEON, is a B Tech from NIT Kozhikode, and was the co-founder of Myntra.
Rahul Jain, 35, is Co-Founder and Head of Engineering at AEON. Prior to joining Acadgild, he co-founded MOZVO and had worked with Deloitte, Infosys and others. Rahul comes with a technology experience of over a decade and completed his B Tech from NIT Warangal.
AEON Learning’s revenue is from the students enrolling on the platforms, and each student paying the programme fee for their chosen course.
For the FY16-17 it clocked revenues of Rs 13.65 crore and claims to grew at 2.5x over the previous year. “By FY18-19, we are expecting to grow by 4.5x,” says Karthik.
This year, AEON Learning raised a funding round of $3.2 million from Ranjan Pai led MEMG Family Office LLP.
Till date, it has cumulatively secured $6.5 million from marquee investors like Vinod Dham, Kris Gopalakrishnan, Atul Nishar, MEMG Family Office LLP, Lionrock Capital, Zodius Capital and Jupiter Capital and Promoters Meena and Ganesh Krishnan.
Market landscape
According to a KPMG-Google report released in May 2017, the online higher education market is expected to touch $1.96 billion by 2021. Re-skilling and online certification courses currently account for a majority (38 percent) of the online higher education market, the report added. There has also been a surge in investments in the online education sector, with online skill training startups shifting focus from a university-based curriculum to a more industry-oriented training approach.
Besides AEON Learning, there are also Simplilearn and SchoolGuru in the similar space in India, while globally, companies like 2U (a listed company with a market cap of $3.3 billion), General Assembly and bloc.io are present.
Talking about its differentiator, Karthik says, “We are the only edtech firm in India that offers both short-term training programmes and long-term higher education degree programmes. Our student experience with real-time live lectures, discussion forums, projects, assignments, quizzes and vast learning resources help students get a better than classroom experience on the cloud, while providing personal attention from our mentors.”
For the future, Karthik says, “AEON’s presence has already reached over 66 countries and we plan to focus on key markets like the US and Southeast Asia. Within India we are present in 150+ towns and cities with plans to expand our dominant presence in South India to the North and West regions.”
Source: Your Story.com (accessed on 9 April, 2018)
