How Amudhavalli Ranganathan of CK Group is helping government schools gain access to education during the pandemic

As daughter of CK Ranganathan, Chairman of the CK Group, 32-year-old Amudhavalli Ranganthan has big shoes to fill. Her father is a renowned industrialist and entrepreneur with interests in personal care and the beauty industry. He is also a founding member of the Ability Foundation, an NGO, working towards the rehabilitation of the physically challenged.

Hailing from the remote coastal town of Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu, Ranganthan always wanted to give back to this roots. His daughter Amudhavalli is at the forefront of this initiative and has set up the CK Group of Educational Institutions that includes a matriculation school, CBSE schools, and a chain of pre-schools in the town.

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A fundamental right

Amudha believes education is a fundamental right, and as an educator, it is also her responsibility to ensure the development of each and every child is never halted.

“During the pandemic, we started our online classes on March 24. Since the first day, we reached out to government schools in Cuddalore and gave free access to students to attend our online classes anytime during the lockdown. We also came up with the idea of launching the classes through a local cable channel. The morning slot of the channel was given to the CK School, which helped students living in the outskirts,” she explains.

“We came up with this idea to ensure that education reaches everyone because there are many places in Cuddalore where there are no internet facilities. This channel telecasted the recorded videos of our teachers covering syllabuses for CBSE, matriculation, and even the pre-primary level such as rhymes, basic concepts, and phonetics,” she adds.

They received an overwhelming response in the first week itself, though the students were initially worried that it would be tough to understand and adapt to online classes. However, Amudha says, the ability of the teacher to connect with the child virtually won them over.

After completing her BSc and B.Ed course, Amudha worked with her father for a few years in different departments of CavinKare, and understood the nuances and challenges of the business.

“As a college student, I used to travel through Chamiers road in Chennai, and there used to be a preschool on the way, which gave me a vibrant feeling that I should also start one. I always loved children and kids were my passion. This motivated me to set up my own preschool in 2014 called CANOPO International, which has been renamed as CK Wonder Kidz,” she recalls.

For the greater good

Thus, her foray into the educational sector began.

The CK School in Cuddalore, earlier known as Baba Matriculation School, was started in 1974 by her late grandparents - Chinnikrishnan and Dr Hema Chinnikrishnan - comprising seven students, which later grew into 900 students.

Initially, her grandparents ran the school independently. In 2010, her father took over the school, and that is when CavinKare entered the educational sector.

“My father always believed that if we venture into the education sector, it would be a part of our CSR. The sole purpose was to give back to the society and ensure the development of Cuddalore, which is our native,” says Amudha.

When CavinKare took over Baba Matriculation School in 2010, it was renamed as CK School of Practical Knowledge. In 2002, The CK Group of Educational Institutions acquired Jayaram Engineering College and renamed it as CK College of Engineering and Technology.

Amudha started to work closely with the CK Group of Educational Institutions from 2016 and was elevated as Executive Director for the group of educational institutions in 2018.

Challenges during the pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic, while affecting the way we live, also made a huge impact on the educational sector. With schools shutting down physical classes, online education became the new normal. For the CK School, it was no different.

“Most of our faculty didn’t have a laptop, but they utilised their phone to prepare PPTs for the classes to make sure it caters to the students post the classes for better understanding. Later, the team went one step ahead and started to give out worksheets to students to ensure the student had understood the concept well,” says Amudha.

The teachers had parallelly enrolled in various training programmes to learn several online teaching strategies and techniques. The school will soon be rolling out Online 2.0, where teaching will be taken to the next level with Microsoft Teams and also LMS software, by providing students with a 360°dimension of learning. Here, even when the child misses the lecture due to power cut or any other issues, they can still go and view the lecture on the online portal.

Also, to ensure the students are not stressed, the school has started yoga and other extracurricular classes online.

“We have also started connecting parents and students with counsellors through phone and are lining up programmes, including webinars, which focuses on mental health,” she adds.

Amudha also aims to recognise budding entrepreneurs among students and encourage them on the path.

She explains, “In school, we have business module classes, where students are given hands-on information on the way businesses function across the world. We have assigned posts to students which enables them to be a part of the operations of the school. We also have parliamentary sessions for children once in every 15 days. Students also set and plan the budgets for events. We also invite experts from the business world to interact with the students at the college.”

Amudha looks up to her father for his leadership qualities.

“I learnt some very important fundamental things from my father, which is patience, fairness, having a progressive mind-set, being honest, empathy, and being grounded in every level you reach in your life, and adaptability to every kind of situation and also to listen with interest on what is being communicated. One fundamental thing that we follow in our company and our institution is freedom of voice, where everyone is free to express themselves with no hierarchy bias,” she says.

Her future plans for the CK Group of Educational Institutions is to establish strong organisational values and set a model for New Educational Policy (NEP) in the country.