That opportunity came in 1993. Ashar started her first preschool in a 650 sq. ft Mumbai apartment gifted by her father, against the backdrop of a city in the throes of communal tension following the Babri Masjid demolition and the subsequent serial bomb blasts that rocked the city.
The school had 10 students and one teacher, besides Ashar. But as word spread, the number of students grew. “I think what worked is that parents saw a difference in their children—cognitively and emotionally,” she says.
Over time, enquiries started coming in from people who wanted to join hands with Kangaroo Kids and replicate the model across the country. The company now has requests from overseas—Maldives, Kuwait and Oman, for example—for schools to be set up there.
Setting standards
Vikas Phadnis, director for sales and marketing at EuroKids International Pvt. Ltd, another leading chain of preschools with a pan-India presence, credits Ashar with having defined quality standards in the preschool segment.
“When she started out, no standards or organized players were there. She has brought about a change in quality almost single-handedly,” he says.
Shekhar Ravjiani, a Bollywood music composer who sent his five-year-old daughter Bipasha to a Kangaroo Kids preschool, says she is happy there.
“What I like about the school is that the children don’t feel pressurized. With education, there is a lot of art and music,” he says.
There’s a price to pay, a lot by Indian standards. A parent whose son attends class III at Billabong High International School, Juhu, said the family pays Rs 53,000 in annual fees, besides Rs 11,000 for extra-curricular activities and Rs3,000 for the uniform. School transport costs extra.
Ashar says the biggest drawback of the conventional education system is that it does not take into account the different learning styles of children. There are visual learners who learn through images, mind maps, demonstrations and body language.
Auditory learners grasp lessons through the spoken word and kinesthetics through doing and interacting.
“Learning has to be made a cool thing,” says Ashar, who sports designer labels including Prada sunglasses or Dolce and Gabbana eyeglasses.
At the Billabong High International School in Santacruz, in suburban Mumbai, where Bipasha’s parents plan to send her next, students dressed in bright blue and yellow uniforms study in air-conditioned classrooms.
It has 24 students in each class, compared with 40 to a class in many private schools and 60 found often in government schools.
Rama Murarka, principal of the school, says: “Here the entire thrust is to ensure that the child is exposed to all-round development, without compromising on discipline.”
Competition and critics
Ashar has no lack of competitors and critics, even within her stronghold of Mumbai.
In 2006, one of her franchisees, the Rustom Kerawalla Foundation, with which she launched the first Billabong High school in the suburb of Goregaon, split from Kangaroo Kids and set up another chain called Vibgyor.