Read Why This Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Took To Teaching In Rural Tamil Nadu

The sole reason behind moving to Tamil Nadu from California for Sridhar Vembu, the founder of Zoho Corporation, was to work tirelessly for the education of underprivileged children of Tamil Nadu.

For decades, his company has been training youngsters in coding and most of its employees are in fact these trained coders and not degree-holding engineers. Sridhar has never paid any attention to a person’s paper credentials but more on how much they know before hiring them.

That is exactly what he is trying to teach these rural kids as well. In the district of Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu, he started teaching 3 kids a few months ago. Now this number has increased and so have the teachers. He has recruited 4 more educators who are known to conduct classes in untraditional ways. 

Sridhar is even planning to start a school that will not seek any affiliation and will not have the usual credit/score system but would only focus on the learning of students according to their understanding and not age. This school will also provide two meals/snacks to kids before they are sent back home every day.

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According to Sridhar, policies made with good conscience get diluted by the time they reach the ground rural area. “This has become a serious project. I am also doing part-time teaching. We are trying to put it together as a model now…busy preparing papers, getting necessary approvals,” says Sridhar to The Indian Express.

It's interesting to see that what started as a lockdown experiment by this Silicon Valley star has now become a ‘Rural School Start-up.'