The government may be under Opposition fire for ushering in ‘jobless growth’, but there are startups which have, even in the midst of a maelstrom around the startup ecosystem, created employment for those in the non-mainstream job market, which few have noticed.

GenextStudents, India’s first hybrid tutoring platform for school students, created nearly 4,000 jobs for private tutors in Mumbai and Pune alone in recent months. “India has 300 million students and a shortage of one million educators. Anyone passionately interested in teaching can join our model that connects parents and the tutor. We want to add another 10,000 private tutors—tutorpreneurs—on our platform this year and one lakh by 2020”, Ali Asgar Kagzi, Co-Founder and Director, told BusinessLine . Genext, which started in 2013 as a content-delivery platform, launched its tutor-aggregating drive in 2016.

He said almost 70% of tutors were engaged by parents to teach their wards subjects like mathematics and English.

As an aggregator of personalized and customized private tutors, Genext caters to school students from class one to 12 in the CBSE, ICSE and state boards like those in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. It is now going to expand to a number of cities across these states and also in Karnataka. Genext identifies, screens, trains and tests potential tutors before recommending them for home tuitions. Parents select and rate them, pay the fees online to Genext, which, after deducting its share, passes on the remainder online to the tutor. “The average fee, across all classes and subjects, is Rs. 200 per hour,” he added.

The demand for private tutoring is so high that Genext registered a 1000% growth last year. “Around 35% of paying parents of students from class one to five are those who have high disposal incomes but no time for their kids.”

Grab, a leading last-mile delivery service providing platform for businesses and merchants across sectors, plans to increase the number of motorcycle riding delivery boys from the existing 2,500 to nearly 6,000 by the end of 2017-18 across more than a dozen cities. “On an average, these riders take home around Rs. 700 per day,” said Pratish Sanghvi, Co-Founder.

Another startup, JobsForHer, an online portal to enable women to restart their careers by connecting them with suitable jobs, is dedicated to helping women return to work and earn their own living. “We have tied up with nearly 3,000 companies across India to provide a connecting platform to women who seek opportunities or restart their career”, said Neha Bagaria, Founder.

She said the companies hire suitable women for various jobs on the JobsForHer platform. Almost 1.5 lakh people have visited its portal. “We do not charge any fees from women. Companies pay us for promotion,” she added.

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