HEAD START

EDTECH VENTURES ARE INITIATING TEENAGE STUDENTS INTO THE 101 OF MANAGEMENT WHILE ARMING THEM WITH NECESSARY SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE TO SOLVE REAL BUSINESS PROBLEMS

- ASHISH RUKHAIYAR

DELHI’S ISHITA ARORA is only 16, but she has already secured a scholarship worth $10,000 from a business school in New Zealand. Gurugram’s Ahaan Chopra is gearing up to present his business idea—to sell fashionable and swanky shoelaces and lace clips— in the first season of Shark Tank India. He is 13. Anish Garg is also 13, but that didn’t stop him from taking his family’s pet adoption business in Bengaluru online during the pandemic.

Prodigies, you say? Hardly. These teenagers are normal kids like any other. They play and hang around with friends—with social distancing—and talk about games and movies, among other things. But there’s a twist. All three, and thousands of other teenagers like them, have been exposed to real-life first-hand experiences in dealing with a business problem and working as a team to find a solution. How? Through the emergence of a strong and buoyant education technology—or ed-tech—sector in India.

While ed-tech includes start-ups that offer a wide range of courses, the ones that offer school students a platform to acquire management, networking and communication skills to embark on an entrepreneurial journey or prepare themselves for B-schools are seeing huge traction. And this traction is being propelled by the aspirations of students like Ishita, Ahaan, and Anish and their ambitious parents.