Manipal: First, the richest family in town began making over this little-known, barren area tucked among the Western Ghats, adding trees, footpaths, two-laned roads, fountains and verdant lawns. Then, it set its sights on the rest of India and beyond.
In the process, the Pai family has helped make Manipal, 60km north of the port city of Mangalore in Karnataka, synonymous with education.
The booming university town is home to the Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG) which, beginning with the vision of using education to help the poor, today operates one of the most commercial ventures in education. Over the last 50 years, the group has grown from a single primary school to 125,000 students in a multitude of disciplines with campuses in Manipal, Mangalore and Bangalore, Sikkim in the North-East and as far as Dubai, Nepal, Malaysia and Antigua.
MEMG today has an annual revenue of about Rs1,500 crore; aside from that, two trusts run two of its universities—Manipal University and Sikkim Manipal University— that generate about Rs250 crore a year in course fees alone. Under the education business come 30 colleges across eight locations. The group churns out about 800 engineers and 730 doctors year after year with more seats being added.
Private equity firms ICICI Venture and Actis are in the fray to buy a stake worth as much as Rs300 crore in Manipal Universal Learning, the corporate body which has under it the group’s international campuses, the domestic vocational courses and distance learning programmes, TheEconomic Times reported 15 July. That would value the entity at roughly Rs3,500 crore, which may make it the country’s most valuable educational enterprise, the report said.
“We are constantly looking for funds to grow our businesses either through an equity or a debt funding or a combination of the two,” Anand Sudarshan, managing director and CEO of Manipal Education, told Mint. “A deal should be finalized in the next three-four months,” he added, declining to name the funds the company is in talks with.
All in the family
Yet the Pai family and university’s rise has been as rocky as the landscape of Manipal.
Patriarch T.M.A. Pai’s death in 1979 sparked a succession row (and later a family split) between his nephew (Ramesh Pai) and his son (Ramdas Pai); the families’ non-banking finance companies went bust; and most recently, the Medical Council of India asked the Union health ministry to derecognize the group’s flagship, Kasturba Medical College.
The family and the group
Born in 1898, Tonse Madhava Ananta Pai belonged to a lower-middle-class household of Gowd Saraswath Brahmins, a community that migrated to the south of India fearing Christian conversions. Kallianpur, a village some 4km from Manipal, was his home.