India's Ad-Supported School System Enlightens Underprivileged Kids

In this series, Sramana Mitra shares chapters from her book Vision India 2020, that outlines 45 interesting ideas for start-up companies with the potential to become billion-dollar enterprises. These articles are written as business fiction, as if we’re in 2020, reflecting back on building these businesses over the previous decade. We hope to spark ideas for building successful start-ups of your own.

Every year, in the fall, the MIT Club of Northern California holds its flagship event in the Bay Area. In 2008, the guest of honor was Nicholas Negroponte, formerly director of the MIT Media Lab, and most famously, creator of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) endeavor.

I spoke with Negroponte about the goals of his project, chronicling the OLPC story for Forbes. OLPC, which Negroponte founded in 2005, had sent 5,000 laptops to Ethiopia, 10,000 to Rwanda, 8,000 to Haiti, and 10,000 to Mongolia – to name just a few countries, and only the first three years of work. By the end of 2008, the organization was expecting to put nearly one million laptops in the hands of needy children all over the world. “Our focus is not the next billion, but the last billion,” Negroponte said, referring to the world’s poorest people.

As I listened to him, ideas began to float into my head about how to roll out a scalable education system in the heartland of India, down to the poorest of the poor. Maybe not the last billion, but certainly the next billion.

OLPC had five core tenets: (a) private ownership, instead of school ownership; (b) low ages, with both hardware and software designed for elementary school children, aged 6-12; (c) saturation, instead of random sprinkling in disjointed geographies; (d) connection; and (e) free and open source. The OLPC laptops were to be sold to governments and then distributed to children by education ministries.

While I took much from OLPC in terms of ideas and architectural underpinnings, the Vidyangan school project was not based on the same principles as OLPC. For example, our laptops were owned by the schools, and our initial target was middle school and high school students, whom our slum rehabilitation partners Camellia, Gagori, Deepti, and others were quickly moving to rural India. While these companies provided the school buildings, all schools on their premises throughout India were to be run by Vidyangan. Our goal: use low-cost connected laptops to teach middle school and high school curriculum, from literacy and languages, to math and sciences, as well as history and geography. Thus, a large part of our emphasis was on creating the right immersive software and digital content.

In a 10-year window, Vidyangan was designed to educate three million kids in the 12-18 age group.

There was a slight hitch, though. The families of these students could not afford to pay tuition, which meant we needed to come up with a creative solution to support these schools from a revenue point of view. Here we looked to the Vidyangan laptops themselves. While on school premises, the laptops were fully networked, connected to the Internet, the world at a touch of a button. But beyond our schoolhouses, Internet access, and through it world access, was an elusive creature. With this in mind, we created a program for India’s top brands like Nirma, Liril, and LifeBuoy to advertize through the laptops, reaching previously untouched consumers in rural India. Yes, our ad- supported Vidyangan school system required that for up to five hours per week, the students would go out to their surrounding rural territory, with their laptops, and show the villagers video clips, acting as brand ambassadors.

In this way, each Vidyangan school supported almost 300,000 brand conversation slots a year. In ten years, the Vidyangan school system had created over three billion brand conversation slots, with over 500 million of those slots supported by our partners, Camellia, Gagori, and Deepti. With each slot priced at Rs. 25 (50 cents), we had $1.6 billion in ad inventory by 2020. And with a 70% sell-through rate, we achieved a billion dollars in annual revenue.

Armed with this unique business model, the job of educating three million underprivileged kids moved from the unthinkable to the undeniable. We tackled a great deal of the teaching with standardized software and content provided by the school system. In the heartland of India, finding great teachers was not easy, so we tackled a good 90% of the content knowledge in software, and we used the “teachers” to manage and orchestrate the classrooms, focusing on supported self-learning.

While all our kids learned the exact same material, their minds were also opened expansively to Internet research and self-guided exploration, so that each child also developed his or her own unique point of view. This resulted in some interesting dynamics. In a school in Sikkim, the kids were studying the Himalayas in geography class. In particular, they were learning about Tibet. As they started digging around on the Internet, some discovered articles on China’s human rights violations. Others discovered an article on my Web site about Tibet being the source of several of the greatest water sources in Asia, and that China wanted to control Tibet for that reason. The discussions and debates that ensued were animated and not in the least bit off topic. Our curriculum was designed to allow for such independent exploration assignments through which not only did the students learn, but so did their teachers, for such abundant Internet access was also new to them.

Vidyangan’s success in gaining widespread adoption of networked laptops attracted a large number of educational software companies to get into the market. We partnered with many of them, affording them the three million sets of eyes and ears we were educating. Very soon, in fact, our software- and content-related R&D dropped to zero as the ecosystem of companies around us began delivering the pieces we needed, filling the gaps as we identified them.

We also encouraged developing an engaged political consciousness in our students. Unlike most schools in India, Vidyangan students were encouraged to participate in political activism, striving for an educated, aware nation. As the BJP tried to spread a message of Hindu nationalism, our students read about Akbar’s Di?n-i Ila?hi? and debated the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. Their teachers encouraged discussions about the philosophical underpinnings of a variety of religions. And the secular philosophy upon which the constitution of independent India was based received thorough back and forth, as did Mahatma Gandhi’s role in the India-Pakistan mess. No stone went unturned – in fact, altogether new stones were discovered and rolled about by student and teacher alike.

Over time, Vidyangan became the single largest school in the world, with over 10,000 networked campuses. We could not only make or break brands through our reach of over 30 million consumers, we also held the power to spread ideas, develop movements, and build leaders. In fact, one of the early team members of Vidyangan, who started off as a high school teacher in a small village in Uttaranchal – an idealistic, inspiring 30-year-old in 2010 – went on to become the education minister of India in 2019. And as he developed political capital, we helped him spread the message of an educated India, a productive India, an enlightened India – far and wide.

Photo credit: One Laptop per Child/Flickr.com.