Chandigarh girl Monika Talwar knew what she wanted even in school—an MBA. So she “dropped the bomb” when, at 15, she told her father she was not interested in becoming a doctor. A bachelor’s degree in business administration and an MBA later, she’s with Educomp, an education services company based in Gurgaon.
Nearly five years later, she feels she’s close to achieving what she had not accounted for in school—job satisfaction. She oversees Educomp’s school outreach, a public-private partnership that takes computer education to government schools. For four-odd years, this has taken the 26-year-old from one rural school in Haryana to another—there are 716 in the state—and scores of others in Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.
Jam-packed: Villagers shopping at a rural mall in Sihore, Madhya Pradesh
The schools are equipped with computer labs funded by the government, while Educomp funds the consumables—paper, floppies, discs, and teaching material. The children do not have to pay, but attendance is by the droves, says Monika, such is the interest children have in learning how to use computer applications such as Microsoft Office.
“I thought I’d become a finance whiz after my MBA, but here I am, going from village school to village school. I never thought I’d feel so happy. I realised the importance of providing computer education in rural schools when I heard students say they’re giving themselves a chance at a better life in those computer labs,” she says.
Seeing the happy faces of hundreds of ‘friends’ in schools in villages such as Bajghera—a half hour’s drive from Gurgaon—makes Monika think she did the right thing. She may spend her days checking if a school has properly conducted computer classes, or asking school children what they’d want more from computer lessons, but that only sharpened her MBA skills. “On the job in rural areas, I realised I need an MBA’s soft skills most,” she says.
Initially, she did wonder if her choice of an education company that would send her to rural India was better than a plush job in the banking or insurance sectors. But on the job, she realised that this was the right place for her. “It’s true that my MBA is in finance and I had imagined a career in that field initially. But in the current scheme of things, the government is our client and I get the opportunity to interact with the policymakers as well as students, teachers, schools and principals. It’s like a rare chance at holistic training,” she says.
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