Educomp bets big on tutorials

To penetrate further into the offline space, New Delhi-based e-learning major Educomp Solutions is planning to invest around Rs 125 crore to set up over 500 tutorial centres by 2010.

The enrollments for the Learning Hour tuition centres have already begun and the official launch is expected to take place early this week.

Educomp Solutions through its subsidiary, ThreeBrix e-Services, has already set up seven centres in the Delhi-NCR region and one in Ludhiana.

"We are aiming to set up 50 centres across India by the end of this year, which will be raised to 150 in 2009. By 2010, we hope to establish over 500 centres across the country," says Chandan Agarwal, founder and director, Learning Hour.

Educomp made a strategic investment in ThreeBrix e-Services by acquiring 76 per cent of the equity capital of the company in April last year. ThreeBrix e-Services owns The Learning Hour tutoring service.

Last year, Educomp entered the offline education space with a warchest of over Rs 2,000 crore for setting up around 150 schools over the next four years.

As part of this multi-crore Millennium Schools project, Educomp Solutions partnered with a real estate developer, Ansal Properties and Infrastructure, early this year to set up schools in Ansal's 16 integrated townships, which are likely to cost Rs 250 crore in the next three years.

The country has 9.5 lakh schools and 22 crore school-going students. An average middle-class person spends 35 per cent of his annual earning on children's education and a large majority of children from the middle-and upper-classes takes tuition from class six onwards.

With an investment of about Rs 25 lakh per centre, Educomp offers a modern tuition centre complete with digital white boards which can store and transmit whatever is written on it to students, a rich multi-media set up along with online content.

Other technology-savvy initiatives include a biometric finger printing for attendance as well as recording of all sessions being held for quality control.

All these facilities can be availed at an average price of Rs 11,000 per subject for a year, varying according to the class and subject.

"Almost 85 per cent of tutoring in India is carried out in tutorial centres, so this was an obvious investment for us. While in the online space, a student spends about Rs 150-200 per hour, in our tuition centre it comes down to less than Rs 1,000 a month," says Agarwal.

"This kind of offline activity will not affect our online business, both these means of tuition cater to different class of people. These centres are established mainly to target the middle income group," he adds.

Each centre will hold classes for about 500 students a day catering to students from class 8 to 12, with about 15-20 students in one batch. Tuition will be provided for 6 subjects "� accounts, economics, mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology "� and the company plans to add english to the list soon.

"Out content is based on the CBSE syllabus at present. We will customise this content for different state boards as well as for ICSE. The roll out of these centres will be done starting from north India," he says. "We are also planning to introduce classes for standard 6 and 7 soon," he added.

At present, these centres are solely funded by Educomp Solutions. However, the company is in the final stages of raising money for this venture.

The details of the investment were not disclosed, but Agarwal said, "For further expansion, we are looking at external funding, details of which cannot be shared at this moment, but it will be done within two months."