Updated: October 10, 2020 8:11:15 am
Sridhar Vembu in the village of Mathalamparai near Tenkasi, where he set up a new office and home in 2019. (Photo Express)
FOR THE REST OF THE WORLD, Sridhar Vembu is the founder of Zoho Corporation, a Silicon Valley star valued by Forbes at nearly $ 2.5 billion who decided to take the unusual step of moving to a small village in Tenkasi in southern Tamil Nadu on last year. But the man himself says that these days he is more of a teacher, wearing the traditional veshti and riding a bicycle in Mathalamparai.
Vembu says he now has four teachers and 52 students in the fold, mostly the children of village farm workers, which began six months ago as home-based classes for three children who spent “about two or three hours” of their time. free time.
The 53-year-old is now ready to take this “lockdown experiment” to the next level: “starting a rural school” that will provide free education and food, a model that does not believe in conventional qualifications or titles or affiliations for certificates, or “credentials” as he calls it.
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“This has become a serious project. I am also teaching part time. We are trying to put it together like a model now … busy preparing documents, getting the necessary approvals, ”says Vembu, speaking to The Indian Express by phone from Tenkasi. However, it is clear that its “start-up” will not seek to affiliate with the CBSE or any other conventional educational board.
It is not a new template for Vembu. Over the past decade, his Zoho University, which is part of the Zoho Corporation, has successfully managed the concept of helping Dropouts 10, 11, and 12 become IT professionals and team leaders in their own company. and in others.
But the challenge in the village, he says, was different after the Covid curbs went into effect. “They were practically unable to attend classes (online after the lockdown)… some parents had smartphones but cheap models. I had enough time and we did some physical experiments, I taught them a little science, math and English, ”he says.
On September 13, Vembu, who is an active Twitter user, posted: “Within days my distant outdoor social class increased from three kids to 25 and the kids got rebellious and I was fighting (smiley) and I I realized how difficult it is to be a teacher. “
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“On the ground, what I see is poverty… I realized that the children who come to our enrollment center are actually hungry. How can you learn something when you are hungry? That has to be fixed. I appreciate the noon meal plan, but that’s not enough, ”he says, adding that his“ school ”offers two meals a day and snacks around 4.30pm, before the children are sent home.
According to Vembu, policies made in Chennai or Delhi with good intentions are diluted when they reach the villages. “There is not enough talent to do the implementation,” he says.
“There are different categories of students among the rural poor population. Some who really want to get credentials, and many others who really plan to drop out at some point, after Class 8 or 10, ”he says. Retaining defectors, he says, is the challenge.
In the village, Vembu says, classifying children according to what they know is better than segregating them by age. “It’s a real initial challenge,” he says, pointing to the kids in class 7 who don’t know the English alphabet.
“Another challenge is that the teachers don’t live in the town. They come and go from a city about 30-40 km away … When people who can afford to send children to private schools even in rural villages and when rural school teachers refuse to send their children there They are the children of the poorest families alone who end up in public schools. Their parents may have a precarious income, they may only have a job for a few days… Alcoholism is another problem. If a parent drinks a lot, he will not bring the income home, and the child will be neglected, starved. I see it here, ”he says.
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Vembu insists that the root of most of the problems in the education system is “credentialism.” “Even bright students focus only on grades, not the knowledge they acquire. There are many non-traditional students. They are among us, in our families. We know them, they are brilliant, but the test results won’t prove it. The system should also accommodate non-traditional students, those who don’t pass exams but still do better in their jobs, ”he says.
Before the school, Zoho, which posted operating income of Rs 3.3 billion in fiscal year 2018-19 with more than 50 million clients, opened more than a dozen rural offices in Tamil Nadu during the shutdown to bring in engineers of software to their villages.
“My only requirement was to set up offices in rural areas. They decided the locations. We will open 10 more offices in three months, opening more in Tamil Nadu, as well as Kerala and Andhra, each with a capacity of up to 100 people, ”he says.
In Mathalamparai, Vembu says, he has made many friends over the last year by visiting tea shops and playing cricket with the children. “They were very hot. They were curious but still very friendly with a stranger, ”he says.
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