Byju Raveendran’s communist influences help 3.5 million poor children

BENGALURU: The communist influences from his early life, combined with his extraordinarily rapid rise to billionaire status, has encouraged

Byju Raveendran

, together with his wife

Divya Gokulnath

, to launch a massive online education initiative for India’s underprivileged.

More than 3.5 million children are already part of the free programme that began in a small way 15 months ago. But so sharp has the pickup been in the past few months that the couple have raised the target for the programme to 10 million children, from the initial 5 million.

“The media talks about us being billionaires, we don’t care about that. Nothing has changed for me in the last 10-20 years, except that I’m able to help a lot more people today,” Raveendran told TOI.

Byju Raveendran

Raveendran’s education technology company Byju’s is currently India’s most valued private company, at $18 billion. Raveendran said he would call their effort a success “only when we create the largest for-profit education company, and the largest not-for-profit initiative.” Between the two, he said, the second is easier to do because there’s nobody doing it at scale.

Raveendran grew up in the communist dominated village of Azhikode in Kannur district of Kerala. That, he said, made him realise “there are a lot of good things about it…I’m not a communist, many of those ideas are not practical…but the best thing about that is looking at all as equals.”

Gokulnath said the inequities in the world of physical education are far more difficult to solve, given the need to set up schools and employ good teachers. “Our virtual offering addresses that issue. We are able to provide high quality education content at a massive scale at zero cost. Our products run even without the internet. For many children, our content has become the primary mode of learning,” she said.

Under Byju’s `Education for all’ initiative, the video content offered in paid subscriptions are offered free to children in poor communities, many of who do not go to school, or have appalling school facilities. English voices in the videos have been converted into 11 Indian languages.

The programme is being implemented through NGOs. “At last count, there were 128 NGOs, and that number is rising rapidly,” Mansi Kasliwal, vice president at Byju’s, who leads the programme, said.

Together with the NGOs, Kasliwal’s team figures out the gap students face – whether it is device, content, or teacher – and takes appropriate steps. “We have children now studying even in the remotest parts of India – Uri, Uttarakhand, Sundarbans. We have children with HIV, who can’t go to schools, so we take the school to their hospital beds,” Kasliwal said.

While many children use a device the family already has, the NGOs are also raising funds to supply appropriate devices. Byju’s too donates.

Gokulnath said their artificial intelligence (AI) system is hardcoded into the app, so the app figures out the most appropriate content for a child even without the internet. The internet is needed only occasionally to sync progress, so that Byju’s can monitor learning outcomes.

Consultancy firm KPMG did a study on the initiative that found that 75% of children use the app for an average of 1 hour every day, and 57% attributed improvement in their performance to the app. Girls form 50% of the learners. Girls, Gokulnath noted, had suffered the highest learning losses during the pandemic.