‘Good education is a launchpad to fight all the adversities in life,’ says Founder of Buddy4study, Ashutosh Burnwal

Glancing through a newspaper or journal, very often, we come across depressing reports on education, especially in rural India. According to a 2009-10 report by the Ministry of Human Resources Development, total dropout rate was 28.86 per cent and 42.39 per cent for primary and elementary categories, respectively. Poverty, family, economic and financial circumstances are considered to be major determinants of school dropouts. Ashutosh Burnwal, the Founder of Buddy4Study, is a man who could relate to this situation.

Ashutosh comes from a lower middle-class family of six, with four brothers. In his house, only one of their education in a reputed private school could be afforded. So his elder brothers decided to give up their share of schooling from a private school for Ashutosh, who was considered the meritorious one. Mindful of all the sacrifices and troubles his family went through, Ashutosh decided to do something for those talented kids who sit back due to financial crunches and other family problems. Thus, he started Buddy4study, a scholarship web portal to inform people about inexpensive or free educational opportunities.

Here’s Ashutosh Burnwal’s story in his own words.

Early years

I come from a lower middle-class family with very limited resources that couldn't support education of all the kids in a private school. So where three brothers studied in government schools, I studied in a private one under the CBSE (Central Board Of Secondary Education) education board. My life was set and smooth due to good education throughout- from best schooling and colleges, to working with Fortune Global top 10 companies.

But my brothers sacrificed and struggled a lot. My eldest brother Santosh Burnwal, had to stop his education after his graduation to help our father (a kirana shop owner) who wasn’t keeping well. And as luck plays nasty games, soon, we lost our father and Santosh had to take over the shop full-time to bare our expenses, including our education. Though I’m a deserving candidate, my brothers are no less meritorious than me; they are my pride. The level of struggles and sacrifices they made to give me a good upbringing is incomparable. Also, my family had to sacrifice a lot to support my engineering education expenses.

The ideation and implementation - getting started

Years later, while pursuing MBA from IMT Ghaziabad, in my first semester, I discovered the NTSE scholarship from a batch-mate. Scholarship is a grant or payment made by organisations (governmental or non-governmental) to support a student’s education awarded on the basis of academic or other achievement. The NTSE scholarship awarded my batch-mate Rs 500 per month in grade eleventh and twelfth.

Due to the constant support from my family for my educational needs, I was among the toppers in both tenth and twelfth board exams, and later cracked IIT-JEE as well. However, I thought if I would’ve been aware of such scholarships, I could have received the grant and helped my younger brother’s school education.

During my Master’s, I started digging deeper into the ‘world of scholarships’ eyeing a scope that could make education affordable for families like mine that have meritorious kids but limited resources. Since information on scholarships is not very easily available, I used to read 17 newspapers in our college library from 2 am to 6 am to go through each and every such advertisement column. And finally after six months, we launched Buddy4study in October 2011 with information on 60 scholarship programmes.

Before formally launching the startup, my Co-founder Rajkishor Chaudhary and I conducted a survey of 2000 to 3000 school students in Noida and Ghaziabad to find out awareness about these endowments. The results were an eye opener. Students knew about only three-to-five scholarships while there are more than a thousand of these available.

Why the name ‘Buddy4study'?

Back in college, three buddies - Ashutosh, Nishant and Bhaumit - wanted to build an education ecosystem to help students along with teachers, alumni and parents as an integral part of it. Thus, came the name Buddy4study, where buddy represents our team, parents, teachers, alumni, professionals and mentors coming together to setup a conducive environment for students. Philosophically, the name promotes buddy-hood within our lives, which means to care and help other co-mates, buddies or friends.

The company is constantly evolving and now is shifting from scholarship awareness platform to scholarship application support platform. Currently, we’ve started working on Scholarship Management Panel (SMP) for schools, colleges, foundations, tuition centres to setup a system for their students. With an inbuilt scholarship mapper engine, the panel’s job is to match each and every ‘student’s DNA with the scholarship’s DNA,’ and provide a scholarship matching the student. SMP helps schools and colleges know about eligible students and and students know about scholarship programmes.

The firm has launched a unique scholarship alert service over SMS to provide time critical, actionable information about the same. More than one lakh SMS alerts are sent to more than 1,700 subscribers. We have also published a scholarship guidebook and have partnered with leading English language and vernacular media publications to extend its reach. With time, we’ve cracked the complexity of these endowment processes and are offering a simple, unified and highly efficient system to all scholarship providers and seekers.

In December 2014, we received South Asia & Asia Pacific Manthan Award. We have also been the winner for Impact in Indian society for improving the status of education in India, and have been selected as the best idea with usage of Internet and mobile technology.

Key learnings

The most important lesson I’ve learnt from my journey till date is to follow the rule of 10,000 hours of practice with patience and progressiveness. I have realised that technology and resources are never a challenge. We must connect to people with an open mind and heart and never take shortcuts, and develop solutions for long run as per vision. It is very important to build a strong culture within the organisation, where team members trust and respect each other.

One thing I religiously follow- “Dream big and dream good for the society. Never stop working towards this dream. Keep sharing your ideas and work with people around you, and take their feedbacks be it from a 10-year-old kid to an experienced professional or from a rikshawala to CEO/Chairman of a company. Involve everyone in your thought process.

“I would like to leave you all at one thought only. When you see kids looking for support to continue their education or struggling with finances, now you know with whom to connect them with,” he concludes.