Tapping mobile youth in India
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

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As LiveWire contributors have been reporting for a while, business information vendors are increasingly focussing their product development efforts on BRIC country content. The most recent example is the FT, with its new digital newsletter Brazil Confidential, as mentioned by Tim Buckley Owen earlier today.

Another BRIC country, India is seen by information providers as a huge growth market and particularly as consumers of information. As Joanna Ptolomey reported last summer, the rapidly growing middle classes in India are turning to mobile devices for access to online information. And this group of information consumers is keen to educate itself and acquire skills using mobile platforms.

McGraw-Hill Education is tapping into this trend by developing a mobile learning platform called mConnect with Indian technology solutions company Wipro. Launched at the recent World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the idea behind mConnect is to “deliver high-quality, low-cost education to students and workers in rural areas and cities with limited access to resources”. Citing data published by research company mobileyouth, the McGraw-Hill press release referred to some interesting statistics: by 2012, 20% of all mobile phones in use worldwide will be owned by young Indians and, despite an increasing number of Indian graduates, only 25% of university leavers are considered employable by multinational companies, largely due to the lack of adequate English language skills. Mobile learning intends to do its bit in bridging the skills gap. Using India as a guinea pig, the intention is to extend the mCommerce programme to other emerging countries in Asia and Africa.

Pearson is another publisher active in the eLearning sector in India. At the beginning of the year the company acquired a majority shareholding in TutorVista, one of the country’s leading digital education providers. As reported in an earlier LiveWire posting, Pearson has had a relationship with TutorVista for several years. The publisher is keen to tap into the growing market for private educational services and online learning. After all, Indian consumers currently spend around $40 billion a year on these types of services. With the Indian government committed to increasing education provision to its young people as a means of sustaining economic growth, we will no doubt be hearing about more Western information providers entering this and other BRIC markets.

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