Discovering a Hybrid Learning Sweet Spot in India: Aakash Chaudhry, Managing Director at Aakash Educational Services Limited

Shiv Gaglani: Hi, I'm Shiv Gaglani. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Aakash Chaudhry to Raise the Line. He's the managing director and co-promoter at Aakash Educational Services Limited, a leading educational institution in India that provides comprehensive test prep services to students taking medical and engineering entrance exams, among others. The company has a network of over 200 centers across India, serving more than 250,000 students. He brings experience with top IT companies to his role, leading the senior management team and providing overall supervision of the company. An alumnus of Harvard Business School, Aakash is an engineer by profession and the founder and a trustee at the Plaksha University. I'd also like to thank Deborah Quazzo, who's also a Raise the Line guest, for the original introduction to Aakash. Aakash, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us today. 

Aakash Chaudhry: Absolute pleasure to be here, Shiv. Thank you so much.

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah. Thank you. I know it's late in India where you're recording this right now. So, the first question we like to ask our guests on Raise the Line is to tell our audience a bit more about themselves, their backgrounds and in your case, what got you interested in engineering and IT?

Aakash Chaudhry: I was trained in computer science engineering but I think my small stint with tech companies in India made me realize that the space in the technology world is changing really fast and I can't be stuck to one technology, so why don't I get on to the other side and program manage and project manage the businesses and the needs of the consumer. So, I think that's where I reached out to companies in and around India and I quickly realized that education is an area which caught my interest. My family started the education business back in 1988. My father, you know, helping kids get into medical school and entering school in India. And I think during that time when I was switching jobs and trying to look out for my passion, my interest areas, I think that's the time when he said, "Why don't you just spend some time with me and help me out with this company?" That was back in 2006. 

Being a family business, one of the things that you want to do is give your child an experience which is absolutely unbiased and give an experience in an environment where you can nurture them. So, I became a brand franchisee of my dad's brand, which was called The Aakash Institute. It's named incidentally after my name. That was one of the starting points for me and in fact, a very, very interesting way to get a family member in the business is to give them an independent market and let them pay for the equity or the brand or the resources that they use, so that they can value it and learn firsthand. So, I spent about three years in Bombay, outside of my comfort zone, which is New Delhi, and learned the business out there and got some really good success in the initial years and got to know the business well. Ever since, I've been in this business and doing okay. 

Shiv Gaglani: More than okay, right? So, can you give us a sense of the trajectory of the company because as I mentioned in the beginning, you educate now over 250,000 learners across 200 physical centers. Obviously, when you joined in 2006, it didn't start like that. Can you talk to us a bit about your growth? And then, maybe that's a good transition into the recent deal you've done with BYJU, which is very interesting.

Aakash Chaudhry: One of the early things that I realized in the education business is that the academic pedagogy, the quality of the product that you give to your customer is very, very important. And being in physical classroom education business, having high-quality teachers available at all times who can teach was a very important element. In India, the test prep segment is not very well structured or organized. We would see people leaving jobs, jumping jobs, just to get some next raise in their salary. So, when I started this business out of Bombay, I vividly remember my first day at the job. I had done up the whole business setup and my center was ready to launch. The first day was awesome. Kids loved the teaching and everything and I was like "Wow. This is a great business. You're doing well, you're getting appreciation, you're making money, you're fantastic." Second day, two of my teachers left or four. I said, "Wow. How can they just leave? This is unprofessional." They said blah blah blah. What decision have I made? But then I quickly realized that this is the opportunity.

If we can provide a seamless and uninhibited supply of talented teachers, then this is a cakewalk. I think in three years, I learned the business and one of the first things we did was come back and start a huge, massive faculty teacher development hiring program in India, where we could go to some of the top schools in India for engineering education and also go to agricultural universities, bio universities to get some biology and zoology professors. We would get this fresh talent, train them for about four or six months and make fresh graduates into teachers. We especially picked kids who've actually written these exams so they knew the rigor. All they needed was training to become a teacher...the body language, the content, the subject, the modulation, the problem solving, the interaction with the kids and all of that. 

From 2009 onwards, we started building the company and we started scaling it. When I joined, we were about twenty-five centers in India and primarily in north of India. When we saw that people are ready to join us and we were able to give them a great career story -- what would happen if you become a teacher and what kind of benefits you will get? It's a most respected career and this profession really builds other professions -- so I think that got a lot of these young kids interested and they started joining us. Ever since, we've been hiring people across the country and been strengthening the weakest link and that became our strongest link. We have a continuous supply of great faculty members on the back of which we could scale the entire company. Today, we have about 215 centers in India and we hope to add another hundred in about a year or so. So, we are on a growth path right now.

The other challenge that we had was, we had teachers but we were able to reach about five percent of the market. We had to, out of no choice, record all our content, go digital. And that also, I remember very clearly, in India they did not have tablets. So, what we did, we recorded content on DVDs and started shipping that. We quickly realized that that's not the best experience and people did not have PCs. They did not have a licensed software to play CDs and DVDs. I said I need a full-fledged, self-sufficient device and we started with Sony PSP 5-inch devices. That was the closest to tablet we could get and that's how we launched our digital products back in 2012. I think from there, we realized that it has to be a mix of offline physical classroom teaching and online for kids who cannot reach us or who cannot afford us. And that's been the story ever since doing physical as well as digital the last eight, nine years now.

Shiv Gaglani: That's two great insights you've just shared there with our audience. One is having a great farm of teachers and training them. One reason my co-founder Ryan and I started Osmosis was, even though we were at Hopkins School of Medicine, the teachers there were mostly clinicians and researchers but not teachers. They weren't trained in pedagogy. And so, I like to say that if we had amazing pedagogical teachers -- we had a couple but that was an exception not the rule -- we probably never would have started Osmosis and recruited Rishi, who's my favorite teacher. He's our chief medical officer who used to run medicine for Khan Academy. But that's a great insight. The second is the omnichannel approach, which is one of the questions I was going to ask you. We've seen this in a lot of other industries like e-commerce companies such as Amazon opening physical stores; Peloton, the fitness company had a physical studio, then scaled it out digitally. You guys were omnichannel before the acquisition by BYJU. Clearly, they're primarily digital. How do you see that playing out...the omnichannel for education within India and outside? Is it essential to build a great business at this point?

Aakash Chaudhry: Absolutely. I think the conversation with BYJU started last year, precisely in July 2020 and we were all in the middle of the pandemic. We had our strengths, physical classroom and test prep, and BYJU had their own strengths, which is online digital and K12. We thought that if we put these two things together, we will have very, very complimentary forces coming together to create a complete universe of offerings, and become a true end-to-end, omni-channel player. I think that has brought in a lot of comfort, a lot of trust in the consumers because of the physical presence of the retail stores and seeing signboards in every city really builds that confidence that this brand is here to stay and this brand is accessible. Since we are in education where there are high stakes for careers, parents and students really want to reach out whenever they are stuck. They don't want to just do everything online. So I think that's where they got this piece bang on...putting the physical and online together and making it into an end-to-end and seamless offering.

Shiv Gaglani: Totally. It makes perfect sense. I'm trying to think of equivalence here in the U.S. but, I think you guys are obviously leading the way in many ways in terms of innovation. So, can you talk to us a bit about how the past year and a half of COVID has affected your work,? By the way I hope your family is safe. All Indian Americans have family and friends who have been affected in some ways. I'd love to hear your experience personally, but also as a company dealing with COVID over the past 18 months. 

Aakash Chaudhry: So, COVID has been a great enabler for us to do lot of new things when it came to changing our business model from the way we used to work in our physical classroom centers to how we are working right now. In March 2020, the lockdown was announced and it took us about seven to ten days to transition our entire classroom going kids to an online platform. Thanks to the experiments that we started back in 2012, we already had about 40,000 kids coming to us for online education and we had a huge amount of experience handling that kind of kid. But transitioning suddenly overnight about 200,000 kids was a massive task for us. Fortunately, we were able to do that transition. But we have seen that after three to four months of teaching kids completely online, we started getting calls from students and parents that they've had enough of online. You know, test prep in India being high stakes, they wanted face-to-face interaction when kids were getting stuck in tough subjects like physics and chemistry and mathematics, and they wanted to spend one-on-one time. They wanted to let the teacher take them through the whole process over and over again until they understand. 

I think that really came out loud and clear, that the world will not shift to complete online just because of the COVID impact. There will definitely be a movement back to physical classroom. What happened in the process is that we were able to identify a sweet spot. We call it the "hybrid education" where you don't have to go to the classroom five days a week or six days a week. You can study four days a week at home and you can spend a day or two with the teacher just to touch upon the problems that you are not able to understand, which is offered completely online. So I think that really opened a new market for us and that also opened a new opportunity for kids who never, ever thought that online education can give them any kind of performance or efficacy. In fact, last year when kids were studying completely online, we had our best results in the last 30 years.

Shiv Gaglani: Wow, that's incredible. 

Aakash Chaudhry: We were absolutely surprised. How could it happen that the teacher being there in the classroom 24/7 and helping our kids did not give us that result, but being at home, completely online, making the teacher and the student both accountable and responsible for their action and for their outcomes really gave us fantastic outcomes. So that really opened the eyes of kids that, "Okay. We were afraid of online that this is not going to give us the outcomes." That has gone away completely. Now, what the kids are asking for, "Okay. If I have access to a physical classroom and it is safe, I'll go there. That's my number one option. But if I don't have that, then I will not shy away from picking up a hybrid or an online program because this works." So, I think that's the new revelation. There was a doubt that online can work in competitive exams. That has been washed away completely with this. So, that's one experience, that we have the change in behavior we have experienced with students.

Shiv Gaglani: That's incredible. Congrats on those amazing results. Can we zoom out a bit and talk about the general medical education landscape in India? So, for context, many of our listeners and viewers are in India. We have 2 million YouTube subscribers at Osmosis and our number two highest engagement country is India. People preparing for need NEET PG and other exams like that. Of your 250,000 learners, what percentage are trying to pursue careers in medicine, trying to, as we say, "raise the line" and get into healthcare careers? 

Aakash Chaudhry: In India, every year there is a limited number of seats offered for medical education. And I think the number of takers are far more than the number of seats that are available. But kids who have gone into the medical schools...this has been a very, very challenging year for them because medical education sans physical experience, is absolutely not of much use. When we are interacting with kids who have gone to the first year of their medical education, they all are struggling currently being taught completely online. Fortunately, being a medical student, they were allowed to interact and go out in the lockdown to the hospitals. So that at least kept their interaction with the patient and with the faculty there at the hospital. But the overall education experience has not been great for any of these medical professional programs that have been offered in India. So, I think that is where some of the other programs -- be it engineering, be it finance, be it liberal arts -- they did fly away with completely online offerings and that did not get impacted as the medical education was. But now, things are opening up and we are very confident that students will recover from the losses that they had in the last year as part of their education. 

Shiv Gaglani: That's great to hear. In the U.S. when things were locked down for our clinical students, there was more adoption of simulation, virtual reality, augmented reality -- those kind of modalities for training. Is that similarly happening in India? And a follow-up to that is, in the U.S. we have the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) that puts out an annual report showing what the physician shortage number will be by certain amount of time. I think in 10 years it's going to be a 150,000 shortage of clinicians -- physicians specifically -- and then many more for nursing and others. If you have any of those statistics available too for India, it'd be really interesting to our audience.

Aakash Chaudhry: So, India currently is running at one doctor to 10,000 patients. That's the ratio we are running at in India. Obviously, there is a huge divide. There is a lot more demand of doctors and associated health workers in India. One of the reasons is because of the limited availability of medical colleges or education infrastructure for providing medical education. Setting up larger facilities or a large number of facilities for medical education in India requires a college and a hospital both together. And that has been one of the biggest reasons why it hasn't kept pace with some of the other profession programs. So, this is where I feel that the demand gap disparity will continue to remain in India. In fact, when you're sharing this data that there will be a shortage of 150,000 doctors and physicians in the U.S., you can well imagine the kind of shortage that we will experience given the limited infrastructure that is there in India. 

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah. One of the solutions in the U.S. is they've implemented a lot of training for allied health professionals and so-called physician extenders, especially in rural communities. So, physician assistant and nurse practitioner are two of the fastest growing careers here in the U.S. with many, many schools opening up every year. Is something similar happening in India and do you all at Aakash help educate learners for those types of exams? 

Aakash Chaudhry: The government is actually trying to make a different kind of program, which is a 3-year program where you can be trained only on primary healthcare, not on secondary and tertiary, because that is the first line of defense where you could actually reach more patients. But those are all plans right now. We haven't seen any addition on the ground as of now. However, there are a lot of private and public partnerships that are coming up to increase the number of candidates who can qualify and get educated in nursing or lab technicians, or some of the other paramedical services educations. So, that is coming up but not at the scale we would like it to be.

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah. But hopefully, one silver linings out of COVID will be renewed interest in public investment in our healthcare capacity, which obviously involves the labor force and the work that you all do. I know given that online learning and digital learning and digital health are here to stay post-COVID, that also opens the doors for a lot of internationalization. Can you talk a bit about maybe growing outside of India and any plans you may have for that?

Aakash Chaudhry: As a test prep company focused on Indian entrance exams, we've reached out to the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, but largely to the Indian diaspora who want their kids get educated for clearing entrance exams or competitive exams for schools in India. And recently, the government has also started establishing exam centers outside of India in the Middle East as well as in Asia-Pacific. So, I think those are the areas where we have reached out and started helping kids internationally. But with merging with BYJU, now we are hopeful that we will be able to assess and put our capabilities in preparing content and pedagogy for some of the competitive exams outside of India, especially in English-speaking countries. So, that's an area that we are currently working on under the brand Aakash NEET PG and hopefully will launch with the BYJU ecosystem very soon. 

Shiv Gaglani: That would be exciting to see how that evolves over the next couple months and years. What advice do you have for people interested in pursuing a career in healthcare, especially around meeting the challenges of COVID and beyond?

Aakash Chaudhry: I think healthcare is really a huge opportunity not only in terms of healthcare services at the front end, but also in terms of research, in terms of pharmaceuticals, chemicals, manufacturing. Healthcare has really shown a lot of opportunities and has shown that there is a lot of need out there and systems are broken. There is a need for quick turnaround and quick responses for any future pandemic that may come. I think you have to make a careful choice before you pick up this career because a lot of doctors were really scared during the pandemic -- not only because of themselves but because of the families they were to go back to. They didn't want to be the reason for anybody in the family to fall sick. So, I think there are a lot of these emotions apart from the opportunity that is clearly opened in front of us. As they say, 'doctors are next to God'. I mean, there is no denying the hard work and the passion that they bring on the table. There are so many wonderful stories of the hard work the doctors and nurses have done this time.

Shiv Gaglani: Yeah. In the U.S., we've seen a major increase in demand to get into these programs. They call it the 'Fauci Effect' -- a 20% increase in applications to medical schools. I'm sure there is something very similar in India. Is there anything else you'd like to be able to share with our audience before we let you go for the evening?

Aakash Chaudhry: Well, I think medical education has come a long way but I think technology can play a massive role in not only keeping the quality of education but the quality of treatment and prognosis. I think there is a good amount of work happening. But I feel if companies like Pfizer and Moderna can turnaround quick solutions based on modern technology, I think there are many, many such areas where technology can enable faster, better cures. And also in continuing education for the medical professionals because they are busy all the time and they need those bouts of knowledge updates with respect to their own stream and technology can really help keep them up to speed with respect to their streams. I think technology has shown that. I forgot to mention, when the pandemic hit, none of our teachers were trained to teach online. They would have a whiteboard and marker kind of behavior. It took us just 10 days to transition the whiteboard and marker teacher to a digitizer and a digital pen teacher. The teachers took it up really well. I think the problem of providing quality education has been solved. I think if people can leverage it well, it will empower the teachers to do far more than what they've been doing. Especially in healthcare education, this will prove as a boon as we go forward. 

Shiv Gaglani: I couldn't agree more. And I'll touch upon that one point real quick as well because in healthcare the diagnosis, treatment and guidelines change on an annual, if not a monthly basis. We do a lot around continuing medical education as a result of that because physicians need to constantly be updating their knowledge, and technology is not only a way to get access to education much faster but understand what they know, what they don't know and then have precision education. So, it's good to hear you saying that because you obviously have a massive scale of impact as well. 

To be respectful of your time, Akash -- I can ask you an hour's worth more questions -- but I really just want to thank you for taking the time to be with us today and more importantly, for the work that you do to help people get into careers in healthcare and the work that you and your team are doing to raise line. 

Aakash Chaudhry: Well, thank you for having me here and I hope you were able to get some nuggets out of the discussion that we had. And all the very best. 

Shiv Gaglani: Thanks so much. And with that, I'm Shiv Gaglani. Thank you to our audience for checking out today's show and remember to do your part to flatten the curve and raise line. We're all in this together. Take care.