Money talks fluently

In 2012, when Ravi Kumar Yadav graduated as the “best student” from the Asian Academy of Film and Television, he was confident of making it big in Mumbai — the city of dreams. He set up Saavi Films for advertisement and video production in December that year, but could not land a single assignment.

Yadav struggled to explain his business ideas in meetings, where people spoke, and claimed to understand, only one language — English. “It was a heavy burden on me and I felt my education was being wasted,” recollects this native of Alwar’s Shahjahanpur village in Rajasthan.

By June 2013, Yadav had had enough of failures in the Maximum City and decided to head back home. He returned to doing what he did previously in Alwar — teach at a computer institute. But alongside, he began reading English content online to sharpen his language skills. He consumed more than 10,000 hours of content, ranging from text to audio-videos, he says. He next began to try speaking the language with those who knew it.He also asked his students to attempt conversations in English and that helped him identify the areas in which they needed help to become more fluent.

Just speak it

By December 2017, through trial and error, Yadav had developed a teaching model for spoken English. He then rolled out his specialised language classes, English Bolega (Will speak English), to help rural students speak fluent English. It has become such a success that English Bolega is adding a new franchisee every two days.

In Mumbai’s Dharavi — the world’s third-largest slum — children have picked up English rather easily after they were introduced to the Karadi Tales interactive audiobooks in 2000.

This was a huge learning experience for CP Viswanath and Shobha Viswanath, the couple who launched the Karadi Tales series in the 1980s. They were convinced that learning a language need not involve teaching the meanings of words or the grammar, as the Dharavi children had no exposure to them.

CP Viswanath: CEO of Karadi Path Education Company

“We wanted to understand the environmental stimuli that leads to children learning the language,” says Viswanath, co-founder, director and CEO of Karadi Path Education Company, which specialises in pedagogy for language acquisition. Beginning in 2000, it took them 12 years of trial and error to finally settle on a teaching method; this was proved to be 11 times more effective than conventional methods, he says.

With the language seen as a passport to success, the obsession with learning English is understandable in a country like India. “Over 90 per cent of the content online is in English. We are living in a globalised world and, if you have to expand your horizons, you need to understand the language that the world has adopted. A trader who knows only Marwari cannot dream of business beyond the Marwari-speaking districts,” says Yadav, explaining the popularity of the English-speaking courses.

Viswanath points out that more and more parents, even in a rural environment, want their children to go to an English-medium school because they feel it will open up better opportunities for them. The higher education system, as well as the employment sphere are loaded in favour of those who are familiar with English, leaving the rest lagging behind.

Going beyond textbooks

Yet, even schools with English language classes are often unable to impart the fluency needed. And Viswanath says he knows why.

“In the best of circumstances, when you learn a language only from the classroom, you never learn it. You speak not because you went to English classes, but because you were in an environment that gave you exposure to English.”

The Karadi Path methodology uses music, stories and physical activities to encourage the use of intuitive intelligence — namely, the intelligence that comes into play when babies learn to walk, learn their mother tongue or learn to sing. “A child will understand much about a story without knowing the language or the story,” Viswanath reasons. The challenge is to keep the child engaged with the narration, by making it enjoyable.

Speaking of success: The team behind English Bolega, a language coaching programme designed specially for rural learners. Within months of its launch, the company has added over 220 franchisee partners, mostly in Rajasthan

To fill the gap between learning a language and being able to actually speak in it, more than 20 apps have surfaced in the market.

“Our users are people who know basic English but are not confident speaking in it. Ours is a practice platform and the main purpose is to give users the confidence and space to speak in the language,” says Ashish Pandey, founder of the EngVarta app.

Users buy a weekly, fortnightly or monthly package, which gives them access to a fixed number of talk sessions with English experts and, in the process, they learn to overcome their inhibitions.

Totally different from one another in their approach, Karadi Path, English Bolega and EngVarta have each built robust business models and are expanding at breakneck speeds. English Bolega charges ₹2,000 for its three-month course. “Our target audience is rural job-seekers in the 18-25 age group,” says Yadav.

His classroom teaching involves getting the learners to start by speaking one sentence in English and gradually moving to more sentences and, finally, daily conversations. Over the course of an hour, the students converse exclusively in English with a ‘buddy’, a teacher fluent in the language.

“Once they overcome the fear of making mistakes when speaking, they can learn the grammar on their own from our free course material,” Yadav says.

Jayant Singh, who enrolled at English Bolega last December and completed his course in February, has just landed a job at a call centre in Jaipur. “Until last year, I struggled to find a job because I could not speak in English despite studying it in school. The language classes helped me develop the fluency and confidence I needed to secure a job,” he says.

Spreading demand

Since its launch in November last year, English Bolega has expanded at a blistering pace, adding over 220 franchisee partners, mostly in Rajasthan. Applications for 600 more franchises are with him, says Yadav. “Applications are now coming from Meerut, Hyderabad, Vadodara, Mandi, Azamgarh, and many other places. In Bihar and Jharkhand, we are close to launching super-franchisees [entailing a high initial fee in major markets].” He prefers to open outlets only in pre-existing computer training centres, as they have the IT infrastructure to support the course’s audio-video content.

Karadi Path’s programme is currently in use at 3,000 schools, including many in tribal areas. The charges, paid by the schools on a per student basis, vary according to the type of school. In the ‘premium category’ are the schools that are equipped to impart English language proficiency on their own, but are able to achieve it sooner by three years with help from Karadi, says Viswanath. Here the charge is ₹1,200 per student for a year.

At the ‘mid-level’ are schools where the learning medium is English but most of the students are likely to be first-generation learners. “We take the programme a little slower and the pricing comes to about ₹600-700 per student.”

In the third category are the government schools where English is just one subject taught for 40 minutes each day. “There we work with clusters of schools to bring down our training and support cost below ₹200 per annum,” Viswanath says.

S Mangayarkarasi, principal of Balasaravana Vidyalaya in Chennai, says her students are from middle and lower-middle class homes and don’t have an English-speaking environment at home. “The only place for them to acquire English is the school. I tried many programmes for years, but with Karadi Path I am seeing great improvement.” Her school has been using the programme for over three years now, and the students have gained the confidence to use English outside the classroom as well, she says.

EngVarta charges around ₹450 for a weekly package, offering four 15-minute sessions. The monthly package — at ₹3,540 — offers 30 sessions. A button on the app connects the user with an expert. “The user has no real-world contact with the expert and is, therefore, not worried about being judged. A lot of our customers are housewives and working professionals,” says Pandey.

The number of users for his app has been growing rapidly since its launch in October 2017. Karadi Tales, too, expects to double its footprint to 6,000 schools in the new academic year. On the radar are schools in north India and even faraway South America, a region from which Viswanath has been getting constant queries. English tutors from a non-UK country? Now, that must count as globalisation, too.

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