Business Today Net Special

There's A Lot Of IT About!

There's an axe hanging above India's infotech brain supply-chain. BT shares the experience of some ambitious students disillusioned by the lack of quality among the mushrooming IT training institutes.

By Ashutosh Sinha

Ravi Sharma joined Wintech Computers' one-year education course in December 1999 with dreams of becoming a Wintech Certified Solutions Developer (WCSD) at its New Delhi's South Extension branch. Ideally, the course should have landed him a plum job after knocking Rs 19,000 off his savings. It should have helped hone his skills in e-commerce, Java, Active Server Pages, HTML, and other applications. Fourteen months later, instead of a job, he is disillusioned, as he says: "Only about 15 per cent of the course could be completed." Doing the odd job and still not being able to find his feet professionally, Sharma has now enrolled his wife for the same course. "I have forgotten the money I have given to them. Now I have to recover whatever I can," he says, bitterly.

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Let's draw a parallel. Enter into any McDonalds outlet in the world (arguably one of the largest franchise operation in the world, the very model on which computer education institutes are being run) and the size of the burger and the thickness of its filling will be the same. What has made this possible? There is one key word--- standardisation. Unfortunately, most of the computer education companies have yet to learn to spell this word. But that has not deterred a host of computer education companies to jump into the race to educate the masses. Worth Rs 1,500 crore and growing at over 30 per cent annually, it is definitely a sellers' market.

Walk into an institute at any city in the country and you could run into examples like Ravi Sharma. The idea is noble, the enthusiasm is contagious, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Whether it is the quality of the faculty, availability of facilities or other issues, the standards are certainly missing in the educational institutes.

Says Partha Gupta, a Hyderabad-based training consultant, who has earlier worked in senior positions with Aptech and Wintech: "The problem with some of the major branded institutes is that they are in a hurry to spread their presence to new locations. In this process, especially at remote locations, availability of right and experienced faculty becomes an issue."

For students, quality of education, or the lack of it, is a real problem in smaller towns. Unfortunately, students in large towns, where their availability is not a problem, are also being short-changed.

Why does this happen?

The dynamics are different in large and small towns. If you are studying in Indore (in Madhya Pradesh), there are not enough high-skilled jobs available, unless you are willing to move to a large town. So, at these smaller centres, the emphasis on quality is, well, absent. Industry estimates suggest that nearly 50 per cent of the Rs 1,500 crore revenues of the players is cornered by the two largest companies, Aptech and NIIT, and 70 per cent is cornered by the top 10 companies. That leaves little option for the other companies than a mad scramble for students. In that rush for revenues, while ensuring that they cut costs, quality is often the first casualty.

Says Subir Ranjan Das, Vice President (Marketing), Edutech Informatics, which runs 81 centres across the country: "Standardisation is very, very important. We have learnt that we should not discount the IQ level of students."

Another problem in smaller towns is whether there is a market at all for the quality of education that these institutes promise. Evidently, the answer is no. So, if the market does not want, the resources are scarce and, sometimes, the students not up to it, the quality of education takes a beating.

But there are problems in the larger towns as well. Take the example of Hyderabad-based C. Kiran Kumar, who joined the Aptech "Fast Track" two-year course. He decided to leave midway because of the frequent changes in the teaching faculty. Having paid Rs 8,000 of the total course fee of Rs 32,000, he was lucky not to have lost a larger sum. But others may not be as lucky since institutes do not return the money that they collect. Their refrain: "We have already incurred a cost. How can you expect us to refund the money?" Most of the institutes in larger towns are plagued with frequently changing teaching staff, which is already in short supply. Says Gupta, the Hyderabad-based training consultant: "This gets all the more aggravated with faculty poaching by other institutes being a common practice."

Time is money. So, if these institutes exceed the period in which the training should be imparted, is that not deficiency of service? With every slip, India's dreams of being the hub of IT services will take a further beating. Of course, the education institutes would have made their money by then.

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