Sri Chaitanya Group of Institutions After three decades of under-the-radar growth in Andhra Pradesh and peninsular India, during which it has imperceptibly evolved into the largest chain of proprietorial K-12 private schools in India, and perhaps Asia, the Sri Chaitanya Group’s second-generation management has ventured forth to establish it as a national brand in English-medium K-12 education The ill-advised 65-70 weeks lockdown of all education institutions — the world’s most prolonged — to check the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated a comprehensive new digital technologies driven makeover in K-12 education countrywide. With middle-class parents compelled to work, and children forced to learn from home, a large and rising number of schools — especially private primary-secondaries which contrary to popular perception, host almost 50 percent of India’s 260 million school-going children — have engineered a new ICT (information communication technologies)-driven education revolution. Suddenly the country’s lackadaisical change-resistant education institutions across the spectrum have been pitchforked into the digital age of ICT-enabled teaching-learning. Even as elections-focused politicians played safe by decreeing school and college lockdowns from pre-primaries to universities, managements — especially of the country’s 450,000 private schools and 30,000 private higher ed institutions which are totally dependent upon students’ tuition and other fees — started pulling out all stops to devise ways and means to maintain learning continuity of students. Fortuitously, this compulsion has resulted in a massive, unprecedented reliance on Internet connectivity and digital learning models. “Although myopic politicians at the Centre and in the states seem unaware of the huge learning loss of an estimated 200 million children in early childhood and primary education — and that’s a staggering number — the silver lining of the dark Covid-19 cloud that has enveloped the country is that the process of digitisation of Indian education has been accelerated by at least ten years. This opens up the possibility of making good the lost learning of the pandemic era through remedial education. India’s moribund education system mired in 19th-century rote learning pedagogies has been pushed into the 21st century. This explains the fast growth of edtech (education technology) companies with outlandish valuations that are sprouting like mushrooms,” says a Bengaluru-based education consultant preferring to remain anonymous. Among the first major private education groups off the blocks to transform the threat posed to K-12 education into a rejuvenation opportunity is the Hyderabad/Vijayawadabased Sri Chaitanya Group of Institutions (SCGI), a well-known name in K-10 and junior college (classes XI-XII)) education. Over the past three decades, SCGI has acquired an excellent reputation for preparing students for highly competitive entrance exams of the country’s top-ranked engineering and medical undergrad colleges. Every spring after school examination boards announce their results, daily newspapers in peninsular India harvest an advertising revenue windfall as test-prep (aka coaching) schools such as Akash, FIT-JEE, Allen, Narayana Group among others, purchase full-page ads to proclaim their students who top IIT-JEE/Advanced, NEET and AIIMS entrance exams. To this list add SCGI which claims that a steady 20-25 percent of school-leavers who enter…
