Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Converting rural internet kiosks into business opportunity

CHENNAI: How to convert the rural internet kiosks being established by the Government into a business opportunity? As captains of the IT industry mull over this question posed by the IT Secretary C. Chandramouli at the inauguration of the 43rd Annual Convention of the Computer Society of India, some young entrepreneurs may have already cracked the answer.

‘e-Vidya’ has a straightforward goal – make students pass examinations. By providing a curriculum-based coaching software, it aims to be a coaching tool to pass examinations. The content was aggregated from many teachers. Some features of the software include, an option to ‘Ask the teacher’, where the teacher’s voice explains the answer in the local language.

Important phrases and keywords the student needs to know to answer the question correctly are provided for each answer. “For example, if the question is on Kepler’s law of motion, some of the keywords would be sun, elliptical orbit and sun at one of the foci. This is a long answer with 12 to 15 keywords,” says V. Srinivas, Venture Officer of e-Vidya.

This project was conceptualised by Hema Murthy, Professor, Computer Science Department, IIT-M.

The pass percentage achieved by e-Vidya is now 89 per cent. “We did a pilot four years ago, and every year, we have had 1,000 students use this software,” says Mr. Srinivas.

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