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Profiting from the Poor: The Edu-Solutions Industry in Hyderabad

Tue, March 7, 11:45am to 1:15pm, Sheraton Atlanta, Floor: 1, Capitol South (North Tower)

Proposal

This study of the private education sector in India lays out both the broad ideological underpinnings of the global efforts to marketise and commercialise education, as well as, a more detailed understanding of how it unfolded in Hyderabad. Conservative estimates from private equity firms place the potential value of India’s education market at $50 billion USD. The sheer size of its youth demographic -- half the country’s population of 1.2 billion is under the age of 25 – provides a massive education market that finance companies, venture capitalists and corporations are eager to exploit. Given that the majority of the population are low income, low- fee private schools (LFPS) are the largest market segment in India. This presentation locates the Indian education market within the global education industry landscape by providing a brief but comprehensive overview of the global players in the “Edu-Solutions” industry and discussing the mechanisms of global financiers within this movement.
We describe India’s unique blend of local school proprietors cum ‘edupreneurs’ who first established LFPS. While resistance from these local school entrepreneurs (coupled with a few legal obstacles set out in right to education legislation) slowed, regulated and limited the massive growth of international chains of LFPS, global investors and education corporations persisted in creating new markets and services in other largely unregulated and virtually untapped sectors. In India new products and services for early childhood education and tutoring services were created, along with a whole new IT market called “education solutions” (including curriculum and classroom resources, assessment and testing systems, training for teachers and education industry leaders, and virtual or online schooling). The report describes how edu-businesses chiefly operate by spreading and advancing market ideology and incentivizing investments through corporate training camps and large scale/high interest financing, and various crowd-sourcing and international edupreneur promotional events. This ‘on-the-ground’ building of market logic by teaching school heads to “think and act like an entrepreneur” has dramatically shifted local understandings, expectations and definitions of education. This paper is based on findings from a commissioned EI report and includes research interviews with school proprietors, teachers, teacher union leaders, technology industry entrepreneurs, journalists and government officials conducted in Hyderabad from August – December 2015. It also included site visits to various technology companies and schools, and classroom observations in both government and private schools.

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