eShiksa is an education service portal that facilitates smooth management of educational affairs of an institute. eShiksa provides the parents a single window for viewing various reports of their ward(s) on the academic front and also paying all kinds of school / college dues and fee online in a secure and convenient manner. eShiksa takes cares of automation of the entire ecosystem of an education institute right from admission to the exit of the students.

Pravin Sharma, former National Sales Head, Atom Technologies started eShiksa in 2014 with the mission of automation and providing an end-to-end solution to the education institutes at a cost effective pricing model.

Today, eShiksa platform is being used by schools / colleges across the country with different student strengths and different pricing models.

Challenges

The most important challenge faced, specially in the mid-level education institute was resistance to adopting digital solutions, which was found to be too fancy by them. They were also not comfortable using any online medium for accepting any dues. Dependence on maintaining manual ledgers / files had made the customers too comfortable and they were not willing to adopt any change. But things have changed drastically since the launch of Digital India programme after which, the institutes are looking to adopt similar solutions and cashless payment options.

Solution

The solution has variants, as follows:

• Advance version – This comes with more than 36 modules, which takes care of the entire ecosystem in the education system right from admission to exit of the child including pre-enabled online fee payment options.
• Standard Version – This comes with more than 12+ modules suited ideally for mid-level institute and small institute to start using digital solutions with pre enabled online fee payment options.
• Shiksapay – This is an online fee collection module with no charges to the Institute, which is a ready to use fee payment option with multiple payment options like Net Banking, Credit and Debit card readily available in the system.

All the above modules come with Web and Mobile app as a mode of access for parent and students.

Following steps were taken for the deployment of eShiksa:

• Onboarding of Client through Sales Channel.
• The implementation process goes through a step-by-step handholding and the team does the set up and provides support.
• Client starts using the platform including parents and students.
• On-site and remote troubleshooting to make the Client comfortable.

The solution is provided on a service based model to the Institutes with client suited pricing options available on Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) model

Outcome

The entire institute and users becomes digital and removes the need for manual registers, viz, no need to maintain attendance registers or fee collection records.

The portal helps educators to manage, analyse and report extensive data, while saving time by eliminating repeated data entry. It covers administrative, academic and accounting activities. eShiksa Education Service Portal is a completely managed portal. The Client is not required to manage any server or hardware to enable eShiksa for it to start using it.

eShiksa is now looking to onboard 1000+ institutes in the next 18-24 months with more focus on enabling services related to parents / students. The team is targeting to break-even by the end of the current fiscal.