New Delhi/Indore: Satya Narayanan R. never sits still. In a meeting, he takes notes, pen running furiously across the page, head nodding vigorously in agreement. If there’s no pen at hand, his fingers are running through his thick, black, wavy hair, or tapping the sides of his knees as a makeshift tabla. Occasionally, he tips his chair back far enough that it looks like he’s about the fall.
Nervous energy has fuelled a way of life for Narayanan, chairman of test-preparatory empire Career Launcher India Ltd. After starting a company that counselled business school applicants more than a decade ago and building it up to a Rs70 crore business, he’s on a new mission.
Seeking ideas: When Career Launcher’s Satya Narayanan wanted to take the company into the mainline education space, he brought in a consultant and polled his staff for their suggestions.(Photo: Harikrishna Katragadda/Mint)
“We have 40,000 schools in India with no children that come to school,” says Narayanan, whose workplace wardrobe includes sea green kurtas and chappals, striped yellow polo shirts with running sneakers. “Parents have chosen to take them out. Can you imagine what is happening?”
For Narayanan, who loves all things to do with education, training and leadership, the solution is simple: just give him the schools.
Career Launcher started moving into so-called mainline education—preschools, grade schools and business schools—a year ago. Now it hopes to turn its five schools into 250 over the next few years, and rewrite the education playbook along the way.
A big piece of that plan is to build on the national curriculum framework published by the government in 2005, which shifted the focus of Indian education from memorizing content to understanding it. Career Launcher’s schools, too, focus on social skills as much as academics, particularly at the junior grades.
At the company’s Indus World School in Indore, for example, which goes up to class VI, everyone pitches in to help one of their classmates. Vedehi, a lower kindergarten student, wasn’t feeling well. Her eyes and her stomach hurt, and she thought she had a fever. “My ma and papa didn’t give me medicine,” she says as she clutches her feet with her hands and squeezes her eyebrows together. “That’s why I’m sad,” she tells her classmates. What should she do?
“Drink water, you can share mine,” one offers.
“What about Pepsi?” another asks.
“Don’t go out in the sun,” a third proposes.
It was a “quality circle time” (QCT) session, a tactic repeated in classrooms throughout the school on a daily basis. The idea is to build communication skills and empathy, and teach the students how to solve problems together and then, eventually, themselves.