A Learning Tool That Stands Out In India's Edtech Frenzy

In Chhattisgarh, a mini revolution is playing out. At schools in Maoist hotbed of Dantewada, students spend 30 minutes daily solving math problems through Mindspark, a digital assistant for teachers. And they enjoy the platform as the interface helps understand the problems better.

The students are among three lakh government school children who log into Mindspark to practice and hone their math skills daily across India. In Chhattisgarh alone, over 10,000 government school students are getting at-home support with the Kaivalya Education Foundation footing the bill currently. 

Similarly, students of 500 top schools in India and a few in Dubai, Singapore and a clutch of other countries in the region log in to practice and learn through this platform. Adapted to suit both rich and poor students, Bengaluru-headquartered Educational Initiatives believes Mindspark can profitably and sustainably serve both segments and improve outcomes for Indian learners as a whole.

Unlike a lot of video content and platforms that claim they are doing the same, Mindspark is the only product on offer in India’s digital learning space that has been through many third-party assessments including one conducted by Karthik Muralidharan under the aegis of J-PAL in 2015. In a prior interview, Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee had told this writer that based on their randomised control trials among students in Rajasthan, they found that Mindspark has proved almost three times as effective with science and math learning for kids “by identifying the stage at which the child is and takes him or her to the next level through a personalized learning journey”. 

What has worked in its favour is the fact that unlike almost all rival edtech companies, Ei has been seeking and participating actively in third party assessments of its offerings, regardless of what the findings of such studies might be. Pranav Kothari, chief executive officer at Ei, says that they welcome such impact assessments as they tell them whether they have moved the needle on outcomes or not and provide a mirror from which they can pivot. “We feel we can be the voice that talks about learning outcomes and impact in an environment cluttered with promises.”

Besides J-PAL, Ei’s products have been assessed by Gray Matters, ID Insight and others. According to Gouri Gupta, director at education-focused non-profit Central Square Foundation. "This ... is the biggest strength since the sector is replete with offerings that are untested and unverified.”

The fact Ei actually helped improve lives is what motivated has 39-year-old Kothari to set his roots in Bengaluru. Kothari had left India at the age of 18 to pursue mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech university in the US. He interned at Capital One and General Electric, joined BCG out of campus in Atlanta and worked on projects in Germany, Chile and Argentina. He joined a private equity firm in New York and Mumbai before going on to do a two-year full-time MBA at Harvard Business School, where he was inspired by the case studies of social entrepreneurs.

After 11 years, he said goodbye to his life in the U.S., made his way back to India and happened to meet one such entrepreneur: Sridhar Rajagopalan of Educational Initiatives and was influenced enough to join the effort in 2011. In 2022, after dipping his fingers in almost every aspect of the business, he was elevated to CEO.

“When I found Ei, I felt this is a big, meaningful problem to solve,” Kothari says. He also felt the company combined the right intent with strong products and offerings—largely missing in India’s burgeoning edtech landscape—had already built trust over the last two decades since its inception in 2001. 

Ei’s main objectives—helping in improving learning outcomes for students in a country notoriously poor in this space and also making life easier for both teachers and students by adopting personalised adaptive learning techniques—resonated with him. “Unlike medicine, engineering or even psychology, too little progress has been made in the science of learning and to an extent we hope to bridge this gap.”

In the frenzy that broke out in 2020 and 2021 among most K-12 edtech players, Ei stood apart. It did not raise any rounds of funding—since inception it has raised only one round; it did not jump into each and every possible segment; it did not hire like there’s no tomorrow; it did not chase mindless growth with virtually no profitability; and it did not use Bollywood stars and other gimmicks to attract learners. Instead, it stuck resolutely to what it set out to do and pushed its primary offerings doggedly. 

The dual effort to improve learning for children at the top and bottom of India’s pyramid ensures that Ei learns and gains insights into both segments—those who can pay and those who can’t—and keeps them on their toes. ”While government school students never get bored, with the private school segment we have to constantly compete with a NetFlix or a YouTube to keep a user engaged,” says Kothari. So while the government school students find Mindspark the best product they have seen, private school children’s wavering attention span forces them to stay relevant.

This, sector watchers say, is likely to hold them in good stead in the future. As India becomes richer and those in the 'cannot afford' category move into those 'who can afford', these insights will prove invaluable, says a sector analyst. “Why should the poorest child not get what the richest does, at least in this aspect” is the thought behind the work Ei has been doing since the word go. This also pushes them into geographies it would never explore in the normal course of business. 

Besides India, Ei is offering its products in 10 countries including Kenya, Nigeria, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia and Dubai and 17% of its revenue comes from the Middle East, South Africa, Singapore and others. It has small offices in Dubai and South Africa. Kothari says 47% of its total revenue comes from private schools while 25% of its learners are from this segment and that barring 2020, Ei has been profitable in every year of its existence.

The government school work is financially supported by P&G, Amazon, Nanhi Kali, Magic Bus and some international funders including US AID, UK AID and the Michael and Susan Dell foundation, among others.

Sector observers and experts vet how Ei has conducted its business. Pramath Sinha, former dean of ISB Hyderabad and an education sector expert, says that of all the players in the K-12 education space, Ei is perhaps one of the only private players that has managed to build trust by not “chasing unbridled growth and has established its credibility with products that have been tested rigorously over a long period of time". This alone makes it stand out of the pack. 

Aditi Mishra, principal of DPS Gurgaon, says that the asset tests provide a good tool for benchmarking. This is endorsed by Deepa Raghavan, former vice principal of DPS, RK Puram, who adds that the diagnostics cell and analysis done by Ei on student learning provide very valuable insights for teachers and school leaders.

CSF’s Gupta says: “Mindspark meets children where they are and its personalised learning helps them remediate effectively”. She adds that the fact that it has presence in both sectors—public and private—helps the company better attune its products for widely different segments. Experts in the space even call it the best “homegrown assessment organisation”. 

The only caveat some of those vested in the space add is that Mindspark’s user interface feels a bit outdated, compared to the newbies. While the fundamental offerings are sound, in a world where technology is ever changing—smarter, faster, hipper—user interfaces need regular upgradation, said an expert in the edtech sector on the condition of anonymity. A second problem, experts argue, could be in accessing talent especially in the area of psychometrics, where India has failed to build up any expertise.

But perhaps the biggest validation of its work came in 2020 when Ei was picked by the government to assist with a major reform of India’s board examinations as proposed by the NEP. Work on the question paper and assessment reform is on full throttle with a small team of Ei’s 350-odd staffers working on this. The whole idea of the exercise is to make the board examination questions less rote and more application based and to test the student’s understanding of the concept rather than his or her memory power and abilities.

Moreover, the application of concepts to real life will be stressed. Already in the 2022 CBSE board papers, 25% of the questions were designed on these lines, a sharp departure from the past. This reform is expected to alter 40% of the exam paper by 2023 and 60% by 2025 to ensure that students and teachers are given time to adapt to the new question pattern and marking system. 

The company is working to reform question papers and assessment with ICSE and at a state board level with Tamil Nadu and Nagaland.

Kothari's and his team seem quite sanguine about the mayhem that is unfolding in the K-12 space around them, which they are observing from a fair distance. For them, little has changed pre and post pandemic and their vision is to see a world where children are learning with understanding.

(Corrects an earlier version that misstated that Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee conducted the third-party assessment under the aegis of J-PAL. That version also erroneously stated that Ei prepared a road map to help CBSE prepare for PISA)

Anjuli Bhargava is a senior business journalist with 25 years of experience across aviation, education, healthcare, edtech and more.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BQ Prime or its editorial team.