Spark's $2 Schools - Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

An Indian MBA student at MIT in 2007 in his thesis came out with an idea based on Prof CK Prahlad's 'Bottom of the Pyramid' model and conceptualized Spark School-in-a-box – an idea to form ten-thousand, Rs. 100 ($2) schools. 

"This thesis presents four business cases for delivering education services to the poor. All four business cases meet three fundamental criteria, namely, they are (i) focused on primary or secondary education for the poor, (ii) commercially viable and (iii) highly scalable. These four business cases were developed as part of my efforts to set up The Spark Group – an idea incubator that is focused on improving the quality of education at a grassroots level.

High-quality schooling delivered at Rs. 100 per child per month through a scalable model built on seven fundamental principles:

1) Private Enterprises Owned and Operated by the Poor: Maximize outcomes by harnessing the power of grassroots entrepreneurship (think HLL Shakti)

2) Industrial Strength Standardization: Plug-and-play model comes with everything required to start and run a school - from curriculum to fee schedule to infrastructure plans (think McDonald’s)

3) Lightning Fast Setup: From “ink on the contract” to “chalk on the board” in 100 days flat (think Starbucks)

4) LocalEntity,NationalIdentity:Adaptedforlocalneeds.Yetintegratedunderone brand – instantly recognized by every poor family in India (think Parle-G biscuits)

5) Best-of-Breed:Noreinventionofthewheel.Assemblethebestelementsofproven models such as Akanksha, Pratham, Parikrma and Gyan Shala (think Cisco)

6) EconomiesofScale:Usesizetoextractbargainbasementprices(thinkWalMart) 7) Aggressive Expansion Strategy: Presence in every state in 5 years (think Reliance)

An excellent Business Case based on creating wealth through the Bottom of the Pyramid Economy along with a huge social impact. The idea wasn't able to live up to the ground situation though and the Spark group was disbanded. 

Can somebody make it work someday !!! 

http://web.media.mit.edu/~sandy/Ayan-Sarkar-Thesis.pdf
http://www.thesparkgroup.net