Paperhut: Back to school but let's talk business now

CHENNAI: In 2009, Aamir Khan-starrer 3 Idiots broke all opening box office records in India, with a story that challenged existing education system and spoke about pursuing one's passion after college. Six years later some startups in Chennai are improvising -pursuing their passion by doing business on the very same campus they graduated from.

Drawing ideas from their campus experiences, these startups try to provide solutions to problems which they themselves once faced as students. One such startup is Paperhut Education, an online portal for engineering students that allows easy access to previous question papers for its 6,000+ users.

The startup helps students borrow complete sets of preowned books for a year which can be returned after use. Having partnered with two engineering colleges, they have al so built for them a software, which could be installed in the internal server and accessed using local intranet. “This gives students access to ques tion papers, internal documents, class notes and the like and they can log in to it even from home,“ said Krishna Murari, co-founder of Paperhut.

He admits that this method is only an extra aid to score marks within a mark-oriented curriculum and testing pattern.

"That is how the current system is. So, unless and until the university changes its testing pattern this is something that would help people score marks."