Rishi Kumar could easily have been a rocket scientist or an aircraft engineer. Instead, the aerospace engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kanpur chose to mentor poor IIT aspirants from Bihar. “I earn as much as, if not more than, most of my batchmates who joined big companies. What’s more, they don’t have the freedom or job satisfaction that I have and they are no longer connected to their humble roots,” says Kumar, who was born in a farming family in Nalanda, 90km from Patna.

Kumar is an edupreneur — a term used for entrepreneurs working in education. His tutoring company, Rishi Chemistry Class in Patna, grooms 125 students at nominal fees for the IIT-Joint Entrance Exams (IIT-JEE). “My dream is to build a school chain for deprived children and teach them chemistry, my favourite subject,” Kumar, who graduated in 2008, states.

He is not the lone techie-turned-edupreneur either. Many IIT graduates seem to have decided that they don’t want to spend their lives caught in a web of long office hours and high stress, however good the pay may be. Now they are looking at options that give them free time and a sense of achievement — often along with oodles of money.

If their predecessors gave up regular jobs to set up information technology (IT) ventures, the new breed is zeroing in on education. IIT Kanpur graduates Lokesh Verma, Rajiv Agrawal, Nishant Sah and Manish Shankar want to “revolutionise” not only IIT-JEE coaching but also science education in secondary schools with their Calcutta-based organisation Edudigm.

That’s not all. Mani Bansal from the 2009 batch of IIT Roorkee set up Zion Tutorials, an online mentorship programme for prospective IIT students. P.K. Bharti, who graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 2009, founded Vidya Drishti, a portal for engineering aspirants, along with 12 IIT undergraduates when he was in his third year. “Education is a sector where you can be an entrepreneur without investing much,” says Bharti.

Yogeshwar Bharat, who graduated from IIT Kharagpur last year, joined IIT coaching school Aakash Institute in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, to pick up the tricks of the tutoring trade. “My ultimate goal is to establish my own coaching centre for the underprivileged in my hometown Ranchi,” he says.

Engineering graduates are investing in education for two primary reasons, says Anustup Nayak, a partner of iDiscoveri, a Gurgaon-based educational research organisation. One, many are sick of the stress — mental or physical — that comes with a corporate job. Two, they appreciate the fact that these ventures come with a tag of social consciousness.

“Your contribution is much more tangible in this field when compared to a career as a technocrat or a manager,” Nayak says, adding that many would-be edupreneurs from the IITs approach his firm for expert advice.

Akhil Tiwari, founder of Graviity, a Calcutta-based coaching institute, seconds that. “IITians are doing a great service to the country,” says Tiwari. “Since we believe that education is the only way out of poverty, we not only grant full scholarships to poor students, but also provide food and lodging to some,” says the IIT alumnus who quit his job with construction firm Larsen & Toubro to start Graviity in 2007.

IITian Rohan Singh, who resigned from a tobacco major to join Tiwari, believes that many students want to join the education sector but are scared to take the plunge. “In the initial period you have to struggle a lot. Besides, there is pressure from family members who want you to take up a secure job,” he says.

A Class apart: Akhil Tiwari with students; (top right) a student of robo.in

However, not everyone believes that mentoring in a coaching centre is quite the same as teaching in a school or college. Jayanta Bhattacharjee, dean, academics, S.N. Bose Centre for Basic Sciences (SNBCBS), Calcutta, stresses that IITians who run tuition schools only serve the booming coaching industry. And the coaching business, many believe, is a parallel education structure that gains from the drawbacks of the national education system while weakening it further.

But many IITians see the new trend as an opportunity to give something back to society. “Today the concept of IITians has changed,” stresses Gagan Goyal, who founded robo.in, an educational venture that introduces school children to robotics. “We are not perceived as engineers or technocrats, but individuals who can excel in any field, including social enterprises,” says the 2004 alumnus of IIT Bombay.

Zion’s Bansal agrees. “IITians can change the face of education with their innovative ideas and spirit of entrepreneurship.”

They certainly could, since one of the biggest problems of the education sector is that it does not attract enough talent. There was a time when top students opted to teach, despite the low pay. Today, only a few do.

“The irony of the Indian education system is that it is not able to attract the best brains,” rues Vamsi Krishna, an IIT Bombay alumnus and co-founder of Patiala-based Lakshya coaching institute. “It is the aim of Lakshya to glamorise the profession of teaching in India and attract the brightest talents.”

That educational institutions need to woo the best of brains is an accepted fact. “Teaching should be made more lucrative to draw the brightest minds to mainstream education,” asserts Bhattacharjee of SNBCBS.

But some senior academics are not convinced that a tutorial centre is the solution. “It’s unfortunate that IITians are turning into petty tutors who promote rote learning,” says Sanat Kumar Roy, head, metallurgical and materials engineering department, IIT Khargapur. Roy fears that this new breed of “glorified tutors” will tarnish the image of the IITs.

“India’s prowess in the field of IT today is because of an earlier generation of IITians who graduated between the Sixties and the mid-Nineties. It’s true that they were part of the so-called brain drain, but then they were the architects of Silicon Valley which eventually recognised the IITs as talent nurseries. Imagine what would have happened if these guys had taken to tutoring,” asks Roy.

SNBCBS deputy director and former IIT Kanpur professor Abhijit Mookherjee agrees. “This defeats the purpose of the IIT, which was set up so that students could contribute to nation building,” he rues. Mookherjee believes that these old boys are out to earn some quick “tax-free” money.

Indeed, there is no denying that many of these techie-turned-tutors get hefty pay packets. Most of the IIT coaching centres — such as Kota-based Resonance, Careerpoint, Allen and FIITJEE — pay ex-IITians Rs 20-30 lakh a year. “Seniors can earn up to Rs 50 lakh a year,” says IIT Madras graduate Ram Kishan Verma, director, Resonance Academy, which has 26 ex-IITians on its payroll.

Roy of IIT Kharagpur believes that even students who clandestinely work as part-time tutors at these centres earn Rs 10,000 per week. “This easy money gets to their heads and they shun corporate jobs that make them work hard, but initially pay little compared to the pay packages offered by big coaching centres.”

Naturally, techie-turned-edupreneurs rubbish the charges. “Maybe some IITians are doing it for money. But people like us are going through the tough route of entrepreneurship, and ours is not just a tutoring shop,” says Umesh Kanodia, who graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 2007 and started teaching at Goiit.com, an online engineering entrance preparation site. “If our tutoring ruins the brand IIT then what about IITians joining foreign stock-brokering firms that bring down economies with all sorts of shady deals,” counters Rishi Kumar.

Some experts fear that if the trend catches on, it may have a negative impact on development.

“The whole idea of imparting professional training at the taxpayers’ cost is to groom a student to be a professional. Training in an IIT is meant to turn you into a technologist or an engineer. You are supposed to build bridges, highways, power plants, software and so on,” says Bhattacharjee. “What would happen if MBBS doctors choose to train medical entrance aspirants instead of treating people?”

Kasturi Lal Chopra, a former director of IIT Kharagpur and an honorary advisor to IIT Delhi, believes that the trend will stop when the current JEE format is scrapped. “The proposed new system is supposed to introduce a new national test on the lines of the Scholastic Aptitude Test taken in the US. It will also take a student’s school-leaving marks into account,” he says, expressing the hope that the new system will concentrate on learning, instead of teaching — which is the focus of most coaching centres.

According to Edudigm’s Rajiv Agrawal, their institutes are not conventional coaching schools that promote rote learning. “We are applying our innovative skills learnt in the IITs to help students pick up problem-solving abilities in real life,” says Agrawal.

Critics may carp about this new breed of edupreneurs, but students are not complaining. For instance, robo.in has received responses from more than 30,000 school students. “Our robotic kit and training programme help children understand the relationship between maths and science and it unleashes the artist, scientist and technologist in them,” says Goyal, who has been touted as one of the top young entrepreneurs of India and Asia by business magazines.

So are the techies serving a cause, or are they merely lining their pockets? Perhaps a bit of both. What’s clear though is that a trend is gaining ground.