3aliens Technovation (3aliens from here on) started off when Vishal and I (Vasudev) got together and decided to improve the education in our country in December of 2015. Prior to this Vishal had worked with François on a project to digitize education, make it free and open source but they hit a roadblock when it came to execution. Vishal realized that many graduates lacked the required knowledge and skill-set and that these graduates spent a ton of money joining supplementary classes to no avail. He wanted to create a network of free knowledge to help students across India to get the right education and apply it in the real world to gain the necessary skill.

I, on the other hand, had a different opinion about education. I saw it as the primary tool to improve India. India is a developing country and unlike developed countries it has numerous problems and possibilities. Is education in India is doing its job? Churning out hundreds of thousands of engineers every year, but to what purpose? Solely to fuel the  outsourcing that created the IT biggies? Visiting USA opened my eyes to the stark contrast between the two countries. It was then that I realized that literacy does not equal education. After returning back in December 2015, all the things I usually took in my stride, shook me out of my stupor. I started seeing everything that could be but is not, like the roads that could withstand years of rainfall, clean neighborhoods, better public transportation and better environment. And I saw the reality where rampant political nepotism is the norm and illogical inconsistencies like poor masses and politico’s million dollar supercars exist. High suicide rate of youngsters who cannot handle the pressure of the education system. Debates about intolerance, religion and censorship while taxpayers money is being lost in scams. I remember reading numerous articles in the early 2010’s on how India will overtake China by 2025 to be the Asian superpower but if citizens do not have their priorities right how can we be sure this growth will sustain?

“Literacy does not equal education”

India’s IT outsourcing bubble won’t last long. Rising automation in IT and changing policies in USA will dwindle the income from these outsourcing contracts. What then? Reports by Aspiring Minds highlight the problem of employability of engineering graduates in India. Unless an engineer is from the top 1% of the country he/she might not be able to handle product development. What happens to the hundreds of thousands of engineers, from various fields like civil engineering, biomedical, mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, industrial, computer, IT, etc. who have joined IT companies, retrained themselves for low skilled IT jobs, if outsourcing from USA stops? I read somewhere that over specialization often leads to extinction. I’m no economist but my guess is that the same holds for economy.

India needs to diversify. India needs to innovate. India needs to create.

And I think education is the only tool that can bring about the numerous changes India requires to develop into a fine country. Born out of these ideas is our intense desire to reform education right from primary school and beyond. With the aim to inculcate good learning habits in and make education more accurate, accessible and affordable to the people India, we started off with the most pressing issues in education. At that time the weight of school bags had been the primary focus of a lot of media outlets. Students of primary and secondary schools across India were carrying bags of an average weight of 6-7 Kgs. Courts ordered the government to find a solution. Government passed the onus onto the schools. Schools were either underfunded or didn’t have the space to provide lockers for students and resorted to temporary methods such as asking parents to photocopy chapters or to tear the books into four parts or more. We decided to tackle this problem with the use of right technology and that is how 3aliens was born.