The Literacy Tradesmen

The dotcom frenzy might have consumed India's metros, but like all such commercial rages, it seems to have left the rest of India unscathed. There might be a few old moneybags desirous of making a quantum leap into cyberspace, but the ones who made their pile recently and can still smell their sweat in their dough would rather invest in safer, more conservative enterprises. There are others with more altruistic intentions who believe that an overwhelming majority of India still needs education, sanitation and health care and thus investments should be directed there. There are still others with noble aspirations of climbing the social ladder and who want to milk their precious hard-earned money for more than its actual worth.

Pawan Tiwari
After a few good years, this farmer from Neelbad, near Bhopal set up the Swami Devakinandan Educational Academy. Now, he's got 'status'.

Jain Public School, Raipur
This community school has an eclectic board. Members range from chartered accountants to shopkeepers.

Gurmeet Singh
Owns an oil and truck business. His primary English Medium School has given him a new self-esteem. Future plans include starting a higher secondary school.

To this melting pot of safe investment, altruism and frenetic social climbing drive, add the final ingredient - an increased demand for education and the synthesis couldn't have been simpler. Invest in a school. And that's precisely what a new generation of investors is doing in the countryside. In the small town of Obaidullaganj in Madhya Pradesh, Gurmeet Singh and his wife have set up an English medium primary school in just two rooms. But then, they also happen to have more students than either the government primary school or even the mission school. "The children of principals of at least six schools, the sdm and the president of the town council study in my school," says Gurmeet with some pride. His roadside lubricant stall and transport business would never have afforded him the same self-esteem.

Gurmeet's family had settled in Umaria village outside Obaidullaganj after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Even after getting an MSc degree he preferred to remain in the vicinity of his village of settlers and ran a small truck business - all the while nursing an ambition to open a school. His wife, meanwhile, earned a small reputation for herself as a teacher in the local government school. After building a house and being in a position to provide for his family, as soon as he realised he had just enough money to make a small beginning, Gurmeet opened the Real English Medium School. It has been six years since the school started and now Gurmeet says he has made enough profits to move into bigger premises. "First we would like to have a room each for every class. Then perhaps a play-room and, god willing, we will eventually start a higher secondary school," says Gurmeet's wife dreamily.

For Gurmeet, small savings may have led to a small beginning but for the Jains of Raipur it was all a well-planned investment. The Jain Public School was started three years ago when this community of hard-nosed businessmen realised that the demand for good education far exceeds the extant supply. Its founder, the late Shantilal Jain, was a philanthropist who also had ambitions of educating his own community to face the new business requirements in a fast-changing world. Nearly 70 people from the community have pooled in amounts ranging from a paltry Rs 5,000 to a whopping Rs 13 lakh to establish the day-boarding school on the outskirts of Raipur on a 30-acre campus with a corpus of Rs 1.5 crore. The members of the board belong to diverse backgrounds - ranging from well-to-do chartered accountants to mere shopkeepers and mill owners.

G.C. Jain, 70, joined the scheme because he had had his innings as a CA while R. Surana came on board he wanted to be associated with the likes of GC and Shantilal. The number of students in the school has grown to nearly 350 and the principal promoter, Dhirendra Jain, feels that a total of 500 would mean running profits for the school.

This is not exactly a business venture and we see this more as an attempt to give back to society what we owe to it," says Dhirendra. Another school in the same town, the Radiant Public School, was started some six years ago on much the same principle. Promoted by an engineer, it promised a life-membership to anyone who could donate a sum of one lakh rupees. The life-membership entails a free education for one's children and an appropriate share in the profits. The school now has more than 75 members and boasts a beautiful campus and adequate buildings. The Agarwal Public School in Indore is a similar product of pooled resources.

But while many are treading the combined venture path, some prefer to go it alone. People like Pawan Tiwari, who do not believe in pooling. Pawan is a farmer from Neelbad near Bhopal and has earned his profits from running a dairy and tilling his land. After a few good cropping years he had some amount stashed away. "Besides some money I also had some land to spare. I thought about it and last year I started the Swami Devakinandan Educational Academy. The idea is to attract children from farming families," he says. In a smallish building, which he designed himself, Tiwari has also started providing boarding facilities for students. Some novel features of the academy include a bookstore from which students can borrow books at the beginning of a year and later return them to be used by the next batch of students. Each student is also given a plot inside the campus on which they are taught to grow flowers and crops. Parents from surrounding villages find that this rural-urban mix at the academy is proving useful for their children. In just a year, Tiwari has become a well-known name in the entire area, a recognition and status he could never have aspired to as a 'mere' farmer.

Sharad Pandey was another dreamer. A man who wanted to do something 'big' that could catapult him from his lic agent-status and into the higher echelons of society. After having started his career as a school teacher in Jhabua district in Madhya Pradesh and even after becoming a 'millionaire insurance agent' through sheer hard work, he still lacked the societal recognition he had expected money to bestow on him. The remedy: a school. Now his plan of starting one in Indore is in its final stages and the Little Angels school will welcome nursery kids this month. Pandey's idea of arranging finance is as novel as any dotcom entrepreneurs'. "In the course of my work as an insurance agent, I found a lot of small businessmen like panwallas and chatwallas who had money they could not pump back into their own business as it had reached saturation point. I managed to convince 16 of them to invest small amounts in this school." Pandey's credibility as an insurance agent came handy, and today he has a corpus of Rs 20 lakh to work with. He has already rented premises and taken in teachers and has even spent some amount in advertising. "The best part is people coming to him for jobs as teachers," says his wife Anu remembering her days in Jhabua. Pandey, like Dhirendra Jain, has also estimated that it takes most schools at least three years to become profitable ventures depending on the school fees and student strength.

The primary reason for this fetish for schools," says Anita Singh, a psychology teacher in Bhopal, "is the respect it bestows." A successful school owner has no dearth of parents lining up outside his door vying to get admissions for their children. In the beginning a school might have to advertise itself, flaunt its facilities and the names of its teachers to attract parents, but as it begins to acquire a reputation, the parents queue up on their own. Obviously, all these schools cater to different categories. A Jain Public school will attract a clientele from a particular socio-economic background while a Little Angels might draw a different sort. But common to all is the respectability the school owners acquire within their own circle. And that, perhaps, is what they basically seek. The school might not prove to be an immediate cash cow, but these entrepreneurs are quite content to wait. After all, a rich man in India must also command respect. Even if he has to teach people to do so.