From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sat Jun 23 2007 - 08:23:53 EDT
"WE ARE addressing the bottom of the pyramid," says Krishnan Ganesh, an Indian entrepreneur, of his latest venture, TutorVista. It is a phrase that cheekily calls to mind the mass poor in his native country-but TutorVista, an online tuition service, is aimed squarely at customers in the developed world. Mr Ganesh founded the company in late 2005 after spotting that personal tutoring for American schoolchildren was unaffordable for most parents. His solution is to use tutors in India to teach Western students over the internet. The teachers all work from home, which means that the company is better able to avoid India's high-wage employment hotspots. TutorVista further hammers home its labour-cost advantage through its pricing model. It offers unlimited tuition in a range of subjects for a subscription fee of $100 per month in America (and £50 a month in Britain, where the service launched earlier this year) rather than charging by the hour. [the sales turnover of the business would therefore be over US$ 2.5 million a year - JB] Tutors are available around the clock; appointments can be made with only 12 hours' notice. It is too early to gauge the impact of the service on educational outcomes, says Mr Ganesh, but take-up is brisk. TutorVista has 2,200 paying subscribers at the moment (most of them in America) and hopes to boost that figure to 10,000 by the end of the year. The company is expected to become profitable in 2008. Even cheaper pricing packages are on the way. Launches of the service are planned for Australia and Canada. Mr Ganesh is also investigating the potential of offering tuition in English as a second language to students in South Korea, where high rates of broadband penetration make the market attractive. Get that right, and China looms as an even bigger prize. From: http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9358954 (India an estimated literacy rate of between 57 and 61% for those aged 15 and older ( http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/countries/country_fact_sheets/cty_fs_IND.html and http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html" ) "India, with 4.6 million children out of school as of 2004, is one of the four countries (the others being Nigeria, Pakistan and Ethiopia) with the largest number of out-of-school children... the figure - derived from the UNESCO Institute of Statistics data - is at variance with the results of an Indian government-commissioned household survey done by the Social and Rural Research Institute in 2005. This survey said that 13.5 million children were out of school, a figure that was close to the results of non-government organisation Pratham's national survey, which put the figure at 14 million." ( http://www.indiatogether.org/2006/nov/edu-ssaperf.htm ) "The [Indian education]system is structured on the premise that almost one-third of children entering primary school will drop out before they reach the upper primary level, and another one-third before they reach high school... What's worse is that even after five years of being in school, only 60% of children are able to read, write and do basic calculations." ( http://infochangeindia.org/agenda8_17.jsp ) There are about 360 million Indian children under the age of 15, of which about 118 million under the age of five, suggesting that about one in 17 children aged 5-14 is not in school. The primary school enrolment ratio is about 90%, net attendance about 73% (females) or 80% (males) and the secondary school enrolment ratio is 56% (males) and 40% (females) http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/india_statistics.html ) Jurriaan
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