By Business India Editorial

Tata Motors’ Engineering and NEET Admission Bridge Accelerated Learning Engagement initiative (ENABLE) is an e-enabled remote learning programme that grooms students of class 11 and 12 from 477 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) across the country to take the JEE and NEET competitive exams. JNVs are co-educational free residential government schools for talented students from rural India, and are among the highest ranking CBSE schools in the country. 

Its central governing committee, the Navodaya Samiti (NVS) has successfully nurtured academic aspirations among JNV students by ensuring 100 per cent of their students clear CBSE board exams. However, training JNV students for leading professional arenas was a major challenge because private coaching for medical entrance tests and IIT JEE was largely unaffordable to them given their limited means. Understanding this, Tata Motors joined hands with NVS to provide JEE/NEET coaching to all JNVs across India through the virtual mode. 

Blended learning model: This coaching programme, conducted in partnership with an NGO called Avanti Fellows, was first implemented in Puducherry, and later replicated in Mangalore and Palghar. Eventually, a blended learning model was devised for inhouse advanced coaching of meritorious students from 50+ JNVs in Kolhapur and Rajgir. This coaching was conducted during winter and summer vacations with a rigorous doubt solving sessions for the rest of the year. 

It was from 2021 that this programme evolved into a remote learning model, and has spread in 477 JNVs across 26 states and 8 UTs, designed to touch the most underserved students. TML displayed agility to respond to the lockdown and school closure and went digital within a month for this coaching programme. The lockdown was taken as an opportunity to scale and reach out to more schools and students with the help of NVS.

ENABLE is being implemented by TML with shared assistance from the government Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti, and other knowledge partners, Avanti Fellows and ex-Navodayan Foundation (ENF). During Covid and for the at-home learning phase, classes were broadcast to students’ mobile phones at their homes with homework and weekly testing. Post-Covid during the in-school learning phase, classes were conducted and broadcast live through YouTube by master teachers. 

To ensure participation and provide directed guidance, students were also reached out individually. The infrastructural requirements to run online classes were taken care of by the schools and NVS, whereas the live classes were conducted by Avanti, along with weekly tests and reports. Currently, 24,000 students are undergoing training in this programme. 

In the last financial year, among the students to have undergone JEE/NEET coaching in this programme, 57 per cent qualified JEE Mains, out of which 63 per cent cleared JEE Advanced. Seventy per cent of the students who have qualified for JEE Advanced got into IITs, with the others qualifying for NIITs and other engineering institutes. “Getting selected for the training programme offered by Avanti and Tata Motors has been a gamechanger in my life,” said Mohammad Ali, a meritorious student from Kargil who enrolled himself in the programme and secured a glorious 333 rank in the ST category in the IIT JEE entrance in 2020. As much as 18 per cent of the students supported by Tata Motors make it to a prestigious institute (as against a national average of 2 per cent). 

Through its latest studio learning online model, Tata Motors aims to coach 1 lakh students for JEE and NEET entrances by 2025, and enrol 30,000 of them into institutes of higher learning. It hopes to continue reaping promising results, creating positive value in the community and cultivating a culture of equitable education.