Hyderabad-based EdTech start-up, BodhaGuru won Facebook’s Internet.org Innovation Challenge in India in the Student’s category. The goal of the challenge was to identify people who are working towards making the Internet more relevant to women, students, farmers and migrant workers.
The founders, Samir Jain and wife Anubha Jain, through Bodha-Guru, are on a mission to make learning interesting and affordable. The two apps submitted by them — Create Child-ren Book and Read Child-ren Book — won $250,000 ('1.62 crore). “We had to show how Internet could help the student community. We submitted the details of the app in May and after evaluating internally, each of the finalists had to pitch their app, the vision etc., over a video conference,” says Samir. Face-book will also act as a mentor, who they can approach for support and technical help.
Samir, a former Microsoft employee, was teaching at a government school. Since then, he always wanted to give back to the society. He says, “I believed that through technology, everyone can learn. I wanted to come up with a solution; that was my way of giving back to the society.” The movie 3 Idiots, starring Aamir Khan, also acted as an inspiration. It was then that the two planned to start BodhaGuru.
“We wanted to teach through stories because it is the easiest medium to understand,” says Anubha.
BodhaGuru, run by a team of eight, is accessible offline to students in government schools through an Android set-top box. “Not only students, but even teachers are learning from this platform,” adds Anubha.
Talking about the apps, which are available on all major platforms, Samir says, “We are trying to solve two important problems. Firstly, creativity is missing in schools right now where students are more into mugging up rather than learning. Secondly, good quality digital books are not available in all local Indian languages at affordable cost. We are trying to solve both the problems. Our aim is to create a community where you can co-create books together.”
People from all ages and various spectrum can contribute to the app. Students can create comic-format books, story books, presentations, greetings and school newspapers. The required images, audio etc. are available on the app. The platform also has interactive books for students from KG to Class VIII. “We are looking forward to reviewers, translators, voice-over artists and illustrators to contribute to the community,” says Samir, adding that so far over 3,00,000 books have been downloaded and over 800 books have been published after being reviewed. They have users from across the world, the majority being from India, US and the Middle East. Anubha adds, “Our daughters Bhavyaa (6) and Anusha (12), are the ones who check before anything gets released and give us the feedback.” The couple wants to utilise the prize money for research and development, community outreach and marketing. “We want to create workshops so people know about the app and contribute to it,” says Samir.
