Chennai
Today, the Sairam Group has 23 institutions under its logo, the disciplines ranging from medicine to management, besides schools and polytechnics. The man who laid the foundation for this success story in 1989 was the late M Jothiprakasam, better known as Leo Muthu. Now, his son, J Sai Prakash, is helping the group stay true to his father’s vision: to create a knowledge society through affordable education.
An IT engineer and a graduate from his own Sairam College, he recalls the one firm lesson he learnt from his father who had insisted he study in his own institution. “He would say when a restaurant owner doesn’t eat at his own restaurant, what does it convey?”. The CEO and Managing Trustee of the Sairam Group says that he would take the bus to college like everybody else. “Though I didn’t like it then, now I realise how big a lesson it was for me,” says Sai Prakash.
He concedes that their infrastructure could be better. “But infrastructure is not everything. The faculty and teaching system that Sairam College boasts of is the reason behind its sustained success. In fact, many staff members have been with us for 22 years, which means most of the professors have been with us since the beginning. We give complete freedom to the faculty. Apart from what Anna University prescribes as the syllabus, we make sure that students graduate to be industry-ready despite the time restriction. In fact, Sairam is one of the first few institutions to introduce webinars in the curriculum to expand students’ exposure to their field of interest. And students have an individual mentor,” he adds.
Sai Prakash is so involved with college activities that he can pick meritorious students’ names from memory. He remembers how a student, called Raghavan, had told the management that he would score a 9.5 CGPA to avail of a full tuition fee waiver. “And he achieved it. In the last year alone, over 750 students have availed of scholarships worth Rs 60 lakhs. I see it as an investment for university rankings,” says Prakash.
Sports and research are the other two areas of his focus. Inviting Sachin Tendulkar and the late APJ Abdul Kalam to his institution was to give students the impetus to pursue their extra-curricular activities with zest. “In our Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Centre (IEDC) cell, five projects are funded by the government, while we fund five others. In research, failure is inevitable, but we want only success. Mangalyan is proof that we have the best of knowledge, we just need to give research its due recognition. In our IEDC cell, we encourage students to come up with interesting ideas and urge them to attempt to develop them irrespective of the end result. We tell them how to market it too,” says Sai Prakash.
His eye is not on deemed university status next. “What we do is service-oriented business,” he clarifies, “and it’s not a complete business. Our country needs knowledge power — and that’s what we attempt to provide,” he says.
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