A low-cost pre-school chain offers hope to rural Karnataka families

Gowda is one of the 36 students enrolled in the Kyathanahalli branch of Hippocampus Learning Centre,a low-cost pre-school chain in Karnataka. Its 77 branches already make it Karnatakas largest and among Indias fastest-growing pre-school chains,with a further 40 pre-schools due to open in the next couple of months. What makes it unique is that its kindergarten centres are in the heart of rural India where childrens English rhymes reverberate through the verdant sugarcane fields and tall coconut palms. Its students are the children of cane and sheep farmers,silkworm rearers and rural traders,some of them the first in their families to step inside a school and a majority of them first-generation English learners.

Even more groundbreaking is the fact that the chain is a for-profit social enterprise backed by Rs 7.5 crore venture capital from Acumen Fund,Unitus and Lok Capital,all international funds which finance entrepreneurs building bottom-of-the-pyramid social ventures.

The founder is Umesh Malhotra,44,an IIT alumnus who was earlier with Infosys and one of the first of a wave of stock option millionaires to leave the outsourcing firm to turn to entrepreneurship. The idea of a rural pre-school chain came to Malhotra,who earlier co-founded and sold an IT infrastructure firm and then launched a library chain by the same name Hippocampus and a restaurant business,when he partnered with an NGO to build libraries in rural government schools.

In order to make a real difference and to build scale,we had to make this a commercial venture,but with a social heart, said Malhotra. The parents at our school are not on dole,they are paying customers, he said.

Malhotra seeded the company in 2010 with Rs 2 crore from family and friends,before getting venture funded last year. In three years,the chain has grown to 220 teachers and 3,000 students.

The pre-schools are situated in large villages of Mandya and Chitradurga districts. The annual fees range from Rs 2,000-3,000,depending on the students kindergarten level.

In many villages in India,the only option for parents is to pack their children off to a ubiquitous network of government-run baalwadis or anganwadis,which are crèches rather than learning spaces. Only the very privileged and ambitious transport their kids to kindergarten in a nearby town,the mere logistics of such conveyance making it an expensive proposition.

Consequently,many rural chidren arrive at the local private or government school for first grade without having been in any prior school-type learning situation.

In contrast,by the time he graduates in three years,Likhith Gowda would have picked up the fundamentals of math,spoken and written English,Kannada,environment awareness,good manners and a bit of polish. The bi-lingual kindergarten combines many fun elements with learning basics drawn from Montessori and Playway methods.

Early childhood offers a powerful learning window which makes early intellectual nurturing critical,said C P Vishwanath,founder CEO of the Chennai-based Karadi Path which makes tools to teach English to early learners. Initiatives like Hippocampus are critical. When a child from a rural or under-privileged background enters school,there is high probability that the child is starting with learning deficits due to poor nutrition and intellectual nurturing, he said.

Hippocampus rural kindergartens aim to stimulate an environment where children can think and express,said its director of curriculum and training,Gayatri R P. In rural India too,convent denotes a privately-run English-medium school,but the standard of education is very poor, said Gayatri. We want to encourage creative thinking rather than learning by rote.

To keep costs low,Hippocampus trains and employs local women graduates or those who have passed Class 12 as teachers. As an additional revenue stream,each learning centre runs after-school support in the evenings where children in Class 1 to 5 from nearby schools are coached in English and Math. Nearly 1,800 rural children are enrolled in Hippocampus after-school centres today besides the 1,200 kindergarten children.

The changes are already noticeable,said parents. The students are carrying their learning home in visible ways. They are neat,proudly identify English words on signs and often reprimand their parents for not washing hands or praying before a meal.

The word in the village is that the children are learning well and speaking English too, said Krishna Kumar,a farm labourer at Kyathanahalli whose three-year-old son Hemanth does not want to miss a day of school. We have not studied but we want our only son to get a good education, said Kumar who dropped out of school after Class 5.

But as with everything else in rural India,it is not easy going. Malhotra said he is working on building acceptance among parents for the schools methods. Parents want their children to write,write and write as they believe that is what constitutes education, he said. Instead,Hippocampus focuses on creative learning,where the learning outcomes are gradual but of high standard. But we will not dumb down, he averred.