Educomp to open 75 IIT Coaching Centres

The diversified education provider, Educomp Solutions Ltd plans to set up about 75 Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) coaching centres pan India, by 2011. The company has announced the launch of India’s first VSAT based Engineering Prep Programme. This programme will be delivered through an India-wide chain of centres called Leap. For students staying in remote towns and semi-urban centres, Educomp Leap will provide accessibility to the faculties spread over across India. These 75 centres will be both company owned and franchised outlets.

Last year, over four lakh students appeared in IIT-JEE and over 12 lakh appeared for AIEEE. While 80 per cent of these students take some form of coaching, a mere 20 per cent of them have access to the top 10 coaching institutes of the country. The rest have to be content with sub-standard coaching due to a variety of reasons, ranging from geographical constraints, cost implications and non-availability of high quality faculty.

Through effective use of VSAT technology, the LEAP centres will deliver standardised, high quality, and cost effective test prep. Keeping in mind the spend patterns in Tier II and III towns, Leap will offer test prep at a fraction of the cost to other centres.

Students at Leap centres will be taught by highly acclaimed and well known faculty. They will have access to high quality study material and a vast library of subject-related, digital teaching resources, and most importantly, video archives.

Shantanu Prakash, CEO, and MD, Educomp Solutions Ltd informed, “We are consolidating our presence in the supplemental education space, which is currently among the fastest growing segment, with an estimated market size of 8 billion USD in India alone. We have undertaken restructuring of our businesses recently and have created a new entity called ‘Educomp Supplemental’ for our supplemental education business which includes off-school services such as tutoring, counseling, and assessment. Post-restructuring, it will be India’s largest supplemental education company”.

He added, “Educomp Leap is yet another initiative which is in line with our mission of being a transformative learning enabler through innovative technology-led initiatives”.

Educomp will open around 75 Leap centres in the current financial year, located across cities like Guwahati, Jalandhar, Amritsar, Varanasi, Allahabad, Meerut, Patna, Surat, Jammu, Patiala, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Agra, Gurgaon, Sonipat, and Ludhiana among others. By 2012 Leap centres will be present in around 200 cities across India. While this year the focus will be on the engineering test prep, plans to roll out other test prep products like Medicine and BBA from 2011-12 are also in the list.