Hippocampus' Rural Preschool Mission Attracts Parents, Funding

BENGALURU: "Let's not beat our kids. We'll make them learn through joyful activities," Rakshith Raj, a young man in his 20s, spoke loudly to 30 women who were gathered in that room. The women gave an affirmative nod, and repeated Rakshith's words: "Let's not beat our kids ..." Rakshith is a trainer for Hippocampus Learning Centre (HLC), a Bengaluru-based preschool network that focuses on educating rural children at affordable costs. He was training a new batch of preschool teachers at an HLC at Thavarakkare in Mandya district before the start of the new academic year. The women who attended were all homemakers from Mandya's villages with education till at least class 10.

HLC, founded by 33-year-old social entrepreneur Umesh Malhotra in 2010, is on a mission to revolutionize preschool education in rural India. That mission has found support from a variety of funding agencies. HLC began with an angel fund of Rs 1.8 crore. A year later, it received Rs 4 crore from Unitus Seed Fund, Acumen and Lok Capital. And last year it raised Rs 17.25 crore from Asian Development Bank, Khosla Impact Fund and Unitus.

Malhotra says many small towns and villages do not have any preschools. "The kids usually enter the first standard without basic learnings such as the alphabet, numbers, and names of animals and colours," he says, explaining his decision to launch HLC.

Malhotra, an IIT Madras graduate, worked with Infosys for nine years and then, in 1999, co-founded an IT companyremote infrastructure manangement company, Bangalore Labs, which was sold three years later. He then decided to dedicate his time and energy to improving education for the poor, which was the origin of Hippocampus. Malhotra first created a reading programme named GROWBY that made children's libraries active places of learning. HLC emerged out of this experience. Malhotra was selected an Ashoka Fellow in 2008 for his pioneering work with libraries.

HLC's curriculum includes practical learning in a joyful atmosphere. The firm has also partnered with other schools and Anganwadis in the state to provide its curriculum.

HLCs are currently in 10 districts including Davanagere, Channapatna, Maddur and Shivamogga. It had 150 centres at the end of the 2014-15 academic year, and is expanding to 300 centres in Karnataka and eight centres in Nagpur this year. The number of teachers will rise from 350 to 800, and the number of kids is expected to triple to 5,200. The school charges Rs 3,000 to Rs 8,000 as fees per annum, depending on the financial standard of the village.

"We are undertaking a project called Mission Finland. Our focus is to bring preschool education to as many students in rural India as the population of Finland by 2020, but at one per cent of the cost," Malhotra says.

Dave Richards, co-founder of Unitus, noted in the context of its first investment in HLC that it is very difficult to scale affordable private schools in India to have the impact that the fund is looking for. "So, we're very excited about the community learning centre model that HLC is developing. HLC is able to rent rooms in villages at a very reasonable rent and recruit local unemployed, high school women as teachers at relatively low salaries. HLC has figured out how to equip classrooms very inexpensively with furniture, books, learning toys and curriculum. All of this means that they can charge families a low school fee and get to cash flow positive with modest class sizes," he says.

But there are still plenty of challenges. The low fees means it will be a while before the venture can hope to make net profits. There are also unusual pressures from parents. Many in rural areas want their kids to learn three or four languages in preschool itself. "We have clearly told them that they will be taught only Kannada and English. We don't believe in putting too much pressure on the kids," Malhotra says.