AISECT plans aggressive franchise expansion

AISECT Ltd, an education, training and services network is looking at opening centres across Punjab over the next one year via franchise route. The expansion is a part of the company’s growth strategy for the next year wherein about 1600 AISECT centres would be launched across Rajasthan, Punjab, Gujarat and Maharashtra by mid-2011.

The company is operating through 8,000 centres across the nation out of which only 10 are company owned and rest all are franchised. The company is running around 170 centres successfully in Punjab in cities like Hoshiarpur, Gurdaspur, Amritsar and Ludhiana.

According to Santosh Choubey, CMD, AISECT Ltd, “Our primary objective for launching these centres is to tap the huge student base residing at the district and block levels. The fact is that even today, millions of students in rural India are denied access to high quality, employment oriented and skill development based education. Merely two per cent of the Indian youth between the age group of 15–29 years have received formal vocational training. Through our network of ICT-based AISECT centres, we want to help bridge this gap.”

Headquartered in Bhopal, AISECT plans to increase its franchise network to about 12,000 centres and three lakh students annually by 2012. Apart from functioning as education hubs, the AISECT centres will also deliver services including data processing and data entry, exam form downloading and results viewing, selling of insurance policies and collection of premiums, ticket booking for railways and selling of recharge vouchers for telecom and DTH among others.