Can a cab ride change your life? Nah. That’s the stuff movies are made of. But it sure can lead to a good business idea. One such cab ride led IIM-Calcutta alumnus Vivek Agarwal to a business startup Liqvid in 2002. He is now the Chief Executive Officer. He has launched EnglishEdge, a software to provide English language learning at an affordable cost. Prior to this venture, Agarwal had co-founded eGurucool which was subsequently sold to NIIT.

Origins

When asked about how he came across the idea, Agarwal says, “I was once talking to a taxi driver and asked him if he wanted to learn English. He said he did because all his customers sitting in the backseat used to speak in the language, which he did not understand and hence felt small. So there is a basic feeling of inadequacy if you can’t speak English.”

Seen as a language of utility by many, English is fast becoming an essential business tool for firms across the globe including several Japanese and German companies. Agarwal adds, “About 120-130 million people in India have some knowledge of the language, the balance billion does not. English is the language of opportunity and it is our obligation to make sure that our people are not deprived of it.”

It was this thought that gave birth to EnglishEdge, a programme that empowers teachers to deliver an effective learning experience through technology. “The programme is available through the Internet on computers, tablets and mobile phones. It has nearly 1,500 hours of content,” Agarwal says.

Liqvid sells its software to schools, colleges, training institutes and corporates. Its audience ranges from six-year-olds to middle-aged users.

India is often seen as a technology-challenged environment for start-ups. Hence, when the founding team - Manish Upadhyay, Co-founder and Chief Evangelist, Pankaj Manchanda, President - Services, and Agarwal - set out, they thought reaching a few thousand people was not enough. Agarwal says, “You have to think of millions, which means you have to scale up education. And the biggest barrier is the availability of good quality teachers. That’s where technology comes into the picture.”

The programme follows a unique assisted learning concept, which is a judicious mix of instructor-led and computer-based learning. In the set-up, the teacher is present in the classroom with a computer and a projector. The students tune in to the audio-visual programme and respond accordingly.

Integration

But how does one integrate teachers into the online model? “Training teachers has been a surprise. The traditional thinking is that teachers are the biggest villains that impede the flow of technology. I think a lot of technology providers have ignored teachers. But actually, teachers are technology providers’ best friends. If you focus on them and make their life easy, they take to it rather quickly,” Agarwal says.

The real challenge, however, was the constrained IT infrastructure for which the team had to come up with several initiatives. Also, customers in India have high expectations on price-value curve and are initially reluctant to use technology in learning.

For an e-learning company, content upgradation could be a crucial factor. At Liqvid, Vivek says, there is a team of PhD experts which is entrusted with this task of generating content and upgrading it. In addition, the company follows rigorous quality assurance processes such as multiple rounds of validations. “An advantage we have is that we don’t have to create content for every class. We create it once and hence can devote more time in content creation and its upgradation,” he says.

But can India, which arguably has one of the slowest Internet speeds in the world, be a profitable market for an e-learning company? Agarwal agrees that Internet speed is a challenge. “But people do not need dedicated Internet connectivity for running our software. We deploy the local network and ask them to sync up once in a while,” he says.

About 30,000 schools already use some sort of online learning solutions, so there is already a large market to tap, Agarwal adds. The youth are living their lives on their smartphones and hence the opportunity is unprecedented, he beams.

Agarwal says, “In the next three years, we are targeting about 5,000 schools. We currently have a few hundred. Our goal is to reach 10 million learners across top 500 cities.”

The company has raised more than $5 million from a variety of investors, including Bedrock, SBI Ven capital, RAMC and SIDBI. The funding has included equity, debt and convertible debt.

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, where everyone has seamlessly switched to the online platform for everything from shopping to paying bills to banking, would education too have to evolve? Agarwal says, “I think both models – textbook learning and online teaching -- work together. We don’t believe we can replace the current teacher-student system. We will not even try. We want to do things online that cannot be done offline. For example, if you want individualised feedback, assessment and exercises, you can’t do that in the current system. That is best done through technology. It can empower the current education system in a big way. In the long term, the current system has to evolve.”

navadha.p@thehindu.co.in

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