The 2008 CLSA (a large Asian brokerage and research firm) survey on Indian education says that the potential for spoken English courses in India is Rs 1,500 crore and growing fast. The market leader in this space is Chennai-based VETA, which is the country?s largest trainer of spoken English. There are many spoken English classes booming all over the country. But VETA is pan-India, the pioneer, and the most focused and organised entity in this space. It is the brainchild of V Ganesh Ram, managing director VETA.

VETA is one of those success stories that can happen only in India and that too in math-obsessed Chennai. Ganesh, coming from a family of straitened circumstances, completed his education in a municipal school and then a government college, earning himself a degree in physics. In college, when he signed up for NSS (National Service Scheme), he had to teach slum children as part of the programme. He realised that he had a talent for making math easy for students who were failing in the subject. He also realised that he wanted to do something on his own and not go for a regular job. This was in 1981, when he had just graduated.

A tuition class was started on the terrace of a neighbourhood house with a thatched roof. He found three students who had failed in math in the 12th standard exams, and charged them Rs 30 each. That was not enough to pay the rent of Rs 175. So he asked each student to find another student. They found two each and his immediate problems were solved. Word spread, classes expanded, and income grew to thousands of rupees. In six months, all the students got through their exams. There was no looking back. Ganesh Ram says quite modestly, ?If you are a good math teacher, you will do well anywhere in the world.? Vivekananda Study Centre was born. ?Swami Vivekananda was my role model.?

Parents demanded more and Ganesh Ram expanded the tutorials to other subjects as well. He started hiring part-time teachers. He roped in his elder brother (who had been the family breadwinner with an aptitude for English) and his sister who could teach economics and commerce. He needed more space and a new location. He no longer wanted to be confined to the neighbourhood. So he moved to T Nagar in the heart of the city, which is well connected by buses and trains to make it easy for students from various locations to come to classes. He also changed the name to Vivekananda Kalvi Nilayam, which in Tamil means a ?centre for education?.

Within two years, he was running the largest tutorial centre in Chennai with 1,200 students. All the city walls had his posters and stencils. That was all he knew about marketing and publicity. Ganesh candidly admits that at that point he had no business plan nor a great vision for the future. He was learning everything from experience and observation and followed his instincts. Financial discipline was very important and all he did was to make sure expenditure never exceeded income.

Ganesh?s brother Rajagopalan noticed that many students wanted to speak English, but did not have the confidence to do so. Rajagopalan started English-speaking classes and they became enormously popular.

Rajagopalan developed his own style of teaching spoken English with witty, simple and easy to follow concepts. Ganesh realised this was the future. The thirst for learning English was overwhelming, especially in the South. He decided to concentrate on the English course and wound down the tutorial centre. Ganesh persuaded his brother to give up his secure government job and join the business.

Looking at the business?s popularity in Chennai, Ganesh wanted to try out a distance education programme. He took the script from Rajagopalan, got Tamil and English typewriters, cut stencils and duplicated the lessons. He started advertising in Tamil magazines. The message was simple. ?Do you want to speak English? Write to us and we will send you the course material.? The response was tremendous. He courageously moved on to other South Indian languages and found that everybody wanted to speak English. Special contact classes were conducted in various cities. In the ?80s, this was not proving to be very popular in the North. But this was to change with the economy opening up and the IT revolution.

By 1995, the business had peaked and Ganesh discovered the franchisee route for further growth and expansion. He was also slowly learning the ropes of running a large business. He recognised the importance of funding for expansion. Till 2005, he had not even gone for a bank loan. By 2005, he started facing some rebellion from a few of the franchisees and some copycats. Business needed a rethink. Ganesh says he appointed JWT as his agency and they helped in giving him new direction. Says ML Raghavan, vice-president and client services director, JWT, Chennai, ?We initiated research that clearly pointed out the huge trust that people had in the brand. We also realised the name ?Vivekananda Institute? was used for a lot of other businesses, which was leading to some amount of confusion. There was the need for contemporising the brand name. We renamed Vivekananda Institute Of Spoken English as VETA and created a strong visual identity. This was our first step. The second step was the more important one of changing the focus of the company from the correspondence model to the contact class model. On the communication front, we showed how easy it was to speak English with training at VETA. This strategy was translated into a TV commercial that showed a housemaid singing an English song. The idea here was to assure the target audience that spoken English was very easy to learn with VETA. The communication worked wonders for the brand.?

Everything changed in the 21st century for Ganesh. He has got PE funding of $10 million for expansion. Now there are more company-owned centres in key cities like Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad and Bhopal. Growth is faster in the North than in the South. There are 250 VETA centres in 140 cities from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. Ganesh plans to open 100 more centres by next March.

VETA is still a private limited company. Ganesh is not ready to disclose turnover figures yet. He admits that the margins are good. He has also taken the first steps in going global with master franchisees in South East Asian countries and an office in Singapore. With a gleam in his eye, he asks, ?Nobody speaks English in Thailand and they all want to. Can you imagine the potential??

sushila.ravindranath@expressindia.com