An educationist, Sushil Agrawal knew that India’s education system had a gap between the marks scored and knowledge attained.
“A score of 80 percent does not always translate into 80 percent education. There is a huge gap between marks and knowledge, especially in schools in Tier II and Tier III cities where there are challenges of resources,” Sushil tells YourStory.
This led him to found Saarthi Pedagogy in 2018.
The B2B edtech company offers products that bring school curriculum, technology, teacher training, and pedagogy on a single platform.
The Ahmedabad-based startup, which began by partnering with five schools in Gujarat, has expanded its partnership to 1,100 schools across India for its SaaS (software-as-a-service) product.
“Technology enables the identification of the tiniest data points, which helps to fill the gaps in teaching and learning,” the Founder and CEO of Saarthi Pedagogy says.
How it started
After graduating in 2009, Sushil decided that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Having been a “scholar student” all his life, he wanted to make a mark in the field of education.
He founded an English-medium pre-school, Maharaja Agrasen Public School, in 2009 in Ahmedabad, and eventually opened another school in the same city.
“From 2009 to 2016, I understood the education system and gained experience running schools at the ground level. In 2016, I became more ambitious. At first, I thought of opening more schools, but then I realised that there were problems to be addressed,” Sushil recalls.
While he was involved in operations, he realised that to expand to more schools, he needed to put processes in place. However, the only data that had been collected at schools was marks and attendance, which did not give him clarity about the school’s performance, or how to plan ahead.
“This led to the idea of processes that help measure the quality of the academics. In every business, there has to be a barometer to test what is being done, and the current education system lacks that. It took me the next four years to develop pedagogy to improve the learning outcome, and which can help the management measure the performance of teachers and students,” he says.
Sushil founded Saarthi Pedagogy to focus on India’s mid-sized schools, which charge fees between Rs 1,500 and Rs 10,000 per month.
“We want to focus on schools at the bottom of the pyramid because they are facing real problems. Schools that charge above Rs 40,000 per month can hire better teachers and develop quality infrastructure,” he adds.
Source: yourstory.com
