How Ameerpet cracked the IT tuition code

Ameerpet may come across as just another nondescript business locality in Hyderabad, but it is in fact a nerve centre of IT education in the country. Among techies, it is as popular as the IT hubs of Madhapur and Gachibowli.

And, without risk of exaggeration, Ameerpet has changed the way technology education is packaged and delivered to churn out industry-ready professionals in large numbers.

The institutes here identify shortfalls in skill-sets and quickly find people from the industry or academia to piece together a curriculum and deliver it over weekends or through daily courses.

This model now has attracted the attention of the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, which has commissioned a study to figure out how Ameerpet evolved into a premier destination for job-ready IT education.

Nimmi Rangaswamy, Associate Professor at IIIT-H, says the pedagogy technique followed by the training institutes at Ameerpet stands out. “It’s student-centric and affordable. They go slow in teaching the skills and they give hope. They come down to the level of the students to make them understand things,” she says.

From basic courses in MS Office to Python, and from SAP to Hadoop, there is virtually no IT course that is not available at Ameerpet. By afternoon, one can see a litter of pamphlets announcing a plethora of courses being offered by training institutes.

An anthropologist by training, Nimmi has employed two research assistants and six interns to conduct the research. The six-month study, which began in June 2017, has come out with some preliminary observations about the model.

“Starting off with basic computer courses over two decades ago, Ameerpet has evolved an ecosystem. It’s non-elite and caters to those who are intelligent but could not make it to good academic institutes,” she points out.

Quick response

“It is its quick response to the gaps in skill-sets that differentiates Ameerpet from other places,” she says.

The findings have been captured in a paper titled ‘Scaling Classroom IT Skill Tutoring: A Case Study from India’. The paper has been conditionally accepted for an upcoming SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) conference scheduled to be held in Montreal, Canada, in April.

Though there has as yet been no census of the institutes located at Ameerpet, it is estimated that about 1,000 of them, small and big, train about 50,000 students a month in a variety of courses.