时间：2022-05-02 05:24:19
On a sabbatical in India in early 2010, Vishal Shah, an auditor at Deloitte in Atlanta, found a cousin of his tense and restless when he visited him in Chennai. Every day the cousin, who wanted to join a technology course, would travel to faraway engineering colleges to collect application forms for admission, and then go back again to submit them.
“In a country like India which claims to be a software superpower, such a system seemed ridiculous to me,” says Shah. “Throughout my student life in the US, I applied online from home.”
Shah saw an untapped business opportunity. To be sure, there were some Indian institutions like the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad that had been providing and accepting applications for admission — and other matters — online for years, but they were just a handful. The majority continued with the archaic system of accepting applications on paper only, with all its inconveniences for the applicant, who still had to jostle with other applicants in long queues. The concept of a services provider, like Hobsons in the United States, catering to hundreds of schools and colleges, did not exist in India.
There are indeed a few ITcompanies like MGRM and Admissionhelp. com that provide assistance if sought, but they take up only one institute at a time. The typical development process also takes almost a month for each school.“This model has been hard to scale because of the time and the resources required to tend to each school,” says Shah.
Into this near-vacuum stepped Shah in December 2010, by putting online a portal, , which hosts free software that any school and college can use to take its applications’ process online. It took him around four months to develop, with the support of his sister-in-law, Ami Damani.
Any admission officer who registers on , will be able to create an interactive online version of paper forms for his institution, using a form builder tool, within 20 minutes. The process does not require installing any additional hardware or software. The product is hosted on a secure cloud network. Though users usually have to pay for such‘software as a service’ products on a monthly subscription basis, NoPaperForms provides the service free to educational institutions.
The catch is that those applying have to pay extra if they want the convenience of the online route. Most institutions charge for the paper application forms they distribute; the portal charges an additional 4.9 per cent — or `30 whichever is higher — per form filled online. Students only have to click on the‘apply online’ link of the college website and they are directed to the NoPaperForms servers for filling and submitting forms, attaching scanned copies of required documents, and so forth. Finally, they pay through net banking, credit or debit cards, or cash coupons from retail outlets.
More and more institutions are turning to NoPaperForms, says Shah. In barely four months, it has 41 institutions registered with it. His first client was Mumbai’s prestigious St Xavier’s College. Says Father Frazer Mascarenhas, the Principal,“The admission process has improved drastically since we went online last year with NoPaperForms.”
It is estimated that around 2.5 crore children seek school admission every year, each of them applying to an average of four schools. Thus around 10 crore applications are submitted at the school level alone. The market’s scope is mind-boggling. A recent Central Board of Secondary Education directive asking all schools to at least put up a website could eventually lead to many of them starting online admissions using Shah’s portal. “We could easily hit 10,000 schools,” Shah says.
Anil Joshi at venture capital firm Mumbai Angels, however, points out that Shah’s business model has no intellectual property attached to the product and can be easily copied by competitors. Shah believes the institutions he has signed on will not leave him in a hurry. “Getting them to even listen to you is difficult,” he says. “Once I am already in with a free product, it will be five times tougher for someone to replace me.”
NoPaperForms is also working on a business-to-consumer platform to engage Facebook-savvy students and spread its brand virally. This platform will let students post updates and share information. If the model scales, as Shah expects it to, the possibilities for it are endless.