Recently, Minal Anand sat down with NewsX for an exclusive interview. The founder and CEO of GuruQ, Minal runs the digital tutoring platform.
She says GuruQ connects student sight top tutors. “We’ve got tutors for languages, study abroad, competitive exams, etc. We want to be a one stop shop for students’ education needs. All of our tutors are top quality tutors, they are the best in their respective fields and areas. We verify all of the tutor’s qualifications, and most importantly, we have tutors in all budgets, ranging from 50 Rs/ hour, to 2,000 Rs./hour. We’ve even got tutors for regional languages, in light of the NEP.”
She says that the fact that GuruQ allows for students to customize their tutors and make sure that the particular tutor is suited to them, sets them apart from their competitors. “Most digital learning platforms follow a very rigid curriculum and course structure. Not at GuruQ. Here, we allow student to tailor their tutor for their personal requirements. Every student has different learning methods and capabilities. The point of GuruQ is to ensure that student can find a perfect tutor for them.”
GuruQ is very different from the current Indian education system. We asked Minal about what inspired her to create such a different platform. “Having grown up in India, I’ve also had tuitions and Indian schooling. We all used to get tutors through friends and family, and if due to some reason the tutor could not come and teach us, or they did not work for us, we would be stuck. We didn’t have an alternative. The need of today is to have things at people’s fingertips. Convenience is key. That is the need that GuruQ fills. The tutoring sector was very unorganized in our country. As children, we never knew if our tutors we qualified or not. GuruQ solves this problem.”
Speaking on the response from parents and students, she says, “Obviously initially the growth was slow. At first we did a lot of platform brand building and by the time we actually spread out, we had a solid brand identity. The response was very good.”
In the pandemic, online education has skyrocketed. Minal says this has been great for GuruQ. “We used to think that one on one education was the best. We didn’t think that online education could be the primary education method, we saw it as a complementary thing. What the pandemic has done, has forced all of us to accept and adapt to online tutoring. There are actually so many benefits that many people have embraced it. Obviously this has come out of necessity, but there are still many benefits.”
In a country where internet and technological access and literacy are still lacking, GuruQ obviously has a lot of issues to deal with. Bandwidth and connectivity being at the forefront of this list of issues, Minal explains to us how she tackles the problems of online education in India. “As a country, we need government support. We need internet connectivity in rural India. Tutors are willing to teach at lower prices, but we can’t do this until the government provides internet access to the rural parts of India.”
We also asked her about Aatmanirbhar Bharat and her feelings on how India can be aatmanirbhar. “We’re an Indian made brand and a woman lead organization. We need support from the government to be able to grow and to make this more widespread. What we’d like to do is to leverage our tutors to have rural training programs, and for things like that, we need the government’s support.”