?The Evergreen Monetary Investment

Education in India is undergoing rapid transformation with increasing government support for private participation. It caters to nearly 640 million people to the age of 30 years and is a highly attractive investment opportunity due to its ‘recession proof’ nature, low working capital requirement and a high-unmet demand.

The Need of the Hour

India is characterised by a society that places a significant premium on education in comparison to such services as healthcare and shelter. Coupled with a lack of easily accessible high quality choices, the society, in general, is willing to pay an inordinate amount towards education. As a result, India has seen steady growth in government and private investment in the education sector. The share of the private sector in the Indian education market has grown steadily. In particular, private players have made substantial leaps in hiring talented teachers, using innovative technologies/curricula and collaborating with new partners to enhance both quality and access to education.

One way of overcoming the shortage of trainers is to introduce the blended learning model for imparting quality education that is scaled on the back of cutting edge technology.

Shivan Bhargava, Group President – Skills & Careers Group, NIIT Limited says: “At NIIT, we have always used technology enabled delivery models innovatively to impart quality education to our students. Synchronous Learning Technology used in NIIT Imperia is one such example.”

Franchising acts as a booster

Believe it or not but franchising is definitely acts as a network booster and can be apprehended in almost every model, may it be an aided education provider or a skill oriented institute. Keeping up the current population scenario, franchising definitely acts as a chain reaction to provide quality education with a standardised format to enhance the reach.

Shrutidhar Paliwal, Vice President, Corp Comm & Media Relations adds: “Aptech is a retail brand present across 60 Indian towns and cities and over 850 franchise locations. We believe in an asset light model and have spread across geographies through the franchise model and we definitely agree that franchising has added wings to our business.”

Meanwhile Bhargava believes: “Our USP has been the standardisation of student learning experience through our; curriculum, teaching methodology, staff member selection and training, infrastructure and certification. The distributed education model with integrated process management aspects make NIIT’s franchising model stand out uniquely.”

Exploring the scope driven markets

The current market scenario elaborative states a very big vacuum created in the tier- II & III cities. There a is a very big requirement for quality sumplementary education institutes and skill education centres etc , and this space needs to be covered with leading players following with the new age investors to make others learn via franchising.

Paliwal is of the opinion that they have been able to find great synergy and business potential in most of the markets they have entered. This is largely due to the deep emphasis on research of the market, growth and development potential and hand holding of the business partner. “We are targeting the emerging markets in tier-II and III cities of India and we will continue with our strategy of multi brand multi geography approach,” he quips.

However, NIIT has evolved over the years & has kept transforming to match the speed & requirement of market, NIIT is focusing on tier-I & II markets for now. NIIT’s franchise model today has over 300 education centres, spawning across over 40 countries and is targeting 30+ locations by 2016 via the franchise route.