The Roy Chowdhury Saga: How a single family shaped the educational landscape in Eastern India
"A conversation with the First Family of Education in the East and the story of how Techno India Group was founded"
Techno India Group is a widely acclaimed knowledge management group headquartered in Kolkata, India, having offered education to almost a million students from Kindergarten to PhD level in the last 35 years. Here is the awe-inspiring tale of the very successful first generation Technopreneur - Founder and Chairman Prof. Dr. Goutam Roy Chowdhury and his family, together dedicated to enhancing quality private education in India.
Prof. Dr. Goutam Roy Chowdhury started his entrepreneurial journey in the education sector at a very young age. His modest background as the son of a junior government officer did not prevent him from achieving academic (and later entrepreneurial) excellence, as his educational path led him to study Economics, Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Science from the most prestigious national engineering and statistical institutions.
A single day at a corporate position was enough to tire him of employment subjugation and big bureaucracies. After he resigned, he started dedicating his time to setting up a computer training centre from his garage in his parents’ house, in Hooghly, West Bengal. This homemade entrepreneurial and resourceful instinct made him earn the name of ‘the Steve Jobs of the East’. He started with only 5 INR in 1984, which he dedicated to printing flyers that he hoped would attract students. Little did he know that these 5 rupees would prove to bring such a high return on investment. Between 1985 and 1994, he opened and ran 70 Computer Training Centres at existing colleges, years before computer awareness and access were popularised. He then brought himself closer to several Eastern State governments by executing large-scale e-governance software projects, including printed voter ID-Cards, which at the time was as visionary as computer education.
To anyone who is lucky enough to have met Prof. Dr. Goutam Roy Chowdhury, it is easy to feel the depth of his dedication, which is still as vivid as in 1984. ‘My goal is to eradicate poverty in India through education’, would he firmly assert. His optimistic and ambitious leadership style has enabled him to achieve inclusive and explosive growth, inviting colleagues, friends and family to get involved within the scope of his dream, and guiding them towards ideas that sound impossible until History tells us that they were in fact not so insane.
In 1998, his dream crystallised into the foundation of Techno India Group (TIG) under which he started his own engineering colleges. Today, this mega consortium counts more than 80,000 enrolled students and 5,000 staff. In 2012, Techno India University, West Bengal was founded as the first accredited private university in West Bengal under the Chancellorship of Prof. Dr. Goutam Roy Chowdhury, following the steps of Rabindranath Tagore, founder of Visva-Bharati University almost 100 years earlier.
He could not have achieved this dream alone. From the year 2000 onwards, Mrs. Manoshi Roy Chowdhury added her benevolent yet firm leadership to the Group’s top management team, taking the sole responsibility of developing Techno India’s schools. In 20 years, she single-handedly gave birth to almost 20 schools across West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, in which more than 15,000 students are currently studying, and whose academic results, innovative pedagogy and most importantly accessibility for students from underserved backgrounds in small towns and villages are flatteringly spoken about. A student of Loreto Convent with higher studies in Zoology, Journalism and Mass Communication, Mrs. Roy Chowdhury’s involvement soon moved beyond management of just the schools, as she stepped into the overall Administration of the Group as Co-Chairperson. It is also interesting to note here that her father, Prof. K.D. Mondal, who she considers her biggest inspiration, was the first person on both sides of the family to have gone abroad to study (Mining Engineering from Glasgow University), and was instrumental in setting up the first engineering colleges of the Group as a Founder Director. A woman of substance, power & positivity, Mrs. Roy Chowdhury is the ultimate operational head of the Group as well as the guardian of its core values and educational quality in her role as the First Lady of Techno India Group & University. She is the glue that holds the TIG family together, with grace, empathy, patience, humility and a strong willingness to give back to society. She is currently involved in advising and working with various organisations like the Rotary Club, chambers of commerce including FICCI, ICC, BNCCI and NGOs like Seva on the ground level, to promote various social and philanthropic activities.
