Bharatstudent.com in expansion mode

Bharatstudent.com, a social utility and networking portal, hopes to double its registered user base from the present 2 million by September this year, on the back of new investment plans and initiatives that it has planned.

The 10-month-old portal, a web property of Axill Europe Limited, the UK-based wholly-owned subsidiary of Hyderabad-based technology, ecommerce and online advertisement solutions provider Northgate Technologies Limited, has embarked on an expansion, which would see the company invest around 300 million pounds (Rs 25 crore) over the next two years.

"Of this, 25 per cent would be capital expenditure, while the rest would be infused into scaling up our human resources pool, creating visibility of the portal and brand recalling involving online, TV and print media advertisements," Virinchi Dasarathi, associate vice-president, Bharatstudent.com, told Business Standard.

The portal had recently launched 'Campus Awards', a platform to grade the best schools, colleges and universities across the country, through online voting by students, staff and alumni.

"Close to 1 lakh institutions from across the country have been selected for these awards across 15 categories, including best primary school, secondary school, junior college, engineering, medical, law, management, best infrastructure and best alumni. The portal will provide the 10 best campuses in each category with Wi-Fi connectivity or furnish PCs for their computer labs, if they don't have any. The results will be out by March 2008," Virinchi said.

As part of its brand recalling exercise, Bharatstudent.com is increasing its number of ground events such as sponsoring college fests.

It has sponsored around 20 campus fests, including an alumni meet at the Indian School of Business (ISB), so far, and targets to sponsor nearly 100 such events in a year.

Plans are also afoot to ramp up the portal's employee strength from 110 at present, to 135 by January 15, 2008, he added.