Education Edge

Education Edge: A magazine for school students
[Print]
Preethi
Express News Service
Last Updated : 15 Sep 2011 01:54:31 PM IST

A student of IIT-Bombay, Shreya Mishra is the founder of Education Edge, a vibrant and youthful English magazine for school students. Mishra and her team, mostly college students, have conceptualised and written the stories. As people who have just moved out of school life, they understand what catches the eyeballs of school students.

“I belong to a tier-2 city of India — Bhopal — and after coming to IIT-Bombay, I realised that students from tier-2 cities lack the level of exposure, awareness and opportunities that students of tier-1 cities enjoy. So in my fourth year of college, I decided to do something to bridge this gap,” says Mishra.

This young crew began with an initial investment of Rs. 2.5 lakh. The designing and printing costs of the magazine that is circulated in Bhopal, Indore, New Delhi, Pune and Ahmedabad, are high — Rs. 19.5 per copy — but the team does not want the cost to be transferred to their readers. They hope to recover the money soon by expanding to other cities like Nashik and Mumbai and later with ads.

The team comprising Neeraj Jain, Prithika Vageeswaran, Niladri Chatterjee, Gouri Nawathe and Mishra, is targeting a largely untapped market of 12-16-year-olds with their all-colour magazine. It focuses on world culture, maths and science, music, movies, books, environmental education, current affairs, career guidance, competitive examinations, technology, hobbies, extra-curricular activities and competitions and also focuses on personality development through their debates, literary exercises, competitions and quizzes. The annual subscription is Rs.300.

They have students from reputed colleges in India and abroad, like IIT-Bombay, IIT-Kanpur, NLS-Bangalore, Stanford University, MIT and Harvard University, contributing articles. As none of them have a journalistic background, the team did a lot of groundwork on how to make knowledge more entertaining.

Prithika is the deep thinker of the team while Neeraj, who works in an investment bank, is the guy with the business acumen. “I work in office for around 9-12 hours every day and come back to my college (IIT-B) to discuss the magazine till 2am, but I never feel tired because I love what I’m doing and the people I work with. All the effort is worth it,” says Jain.

“We currently have 500 subscribers in Bhopal alone and our magazine is also being circulated to 200 school libraries pan-India through the network of Indian National Trust for Art & Cultural Heritage & WWF-India, who are partners,” says Mishra about the reach of their magazine.

Two issues down, people have reacted well to their initiative. “We started off with a team of three students. Today we have 30 people working on content development, designing, marketing and sales. Our subscribers are also appreciating the content. We often get mails from elated readers telling us what they liked in our issue,” beams Mishra.

“When we came up with the idea, everyone told us that selling content was very difficult in India andx where one could do a profitable business. We deliberated on the market opportunity and carefully chose our target audience,” adds Mishra.

“What sets our magazine apart is that we want to present education in the holistic sense by transcending what the textbooks teach us,” says Vageeswaran. Mishra and her team hope to continue the mag work even after graduation.

“We intend to run the magazine even with our jobs, but the main operations will be handed over to students still in college,” she says. Visit www.educationedge.in for more details.