Indian conglomerate Aditya Birla Group is eyeing to acquire the education and training arm of Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services Ltd (IL&FS). The arm is known as IL&FS Education and Technology Services (IETS).
IETS is a wholly owned subsidiary of IL&FS and operates computer labs in government schools under the build-own-operate (BOO) model. It manages 16,000 schools in 11 states and also offers vocational skills training to youth funded by governments and corporates.
Last year, the company trained nearly 300,000 candidates and was the biggest such trainer under the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana which is the Indian government’s skill development programme.
The company is operational in 17 countries in the Middle East and North Africa and South and South East Asia. The Aditya Birla Group has been attempting to enter the for-profit education space for a while. It runs a catalog of learning, development and skill training programmes under separate businesses and as part of the Aditya Birla Skills Foundation.
Aditya Birla Skills Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that provides vocational education and skills training to job-seekers and also runs multi-skills training centres in several areas.
The Aditya Birla Group was in talks with debt-laden Educomp Solutions in 2014 to buy its schools business. A spokesperson for Aditya Birla said that the group does not comment on market speculation as a matter of policy. An IL&FS spokesperson did not respond to emailed queries till the time of going to press.
For IL&FS, with close to Rs 90,000 crore in debt, the group is ready to sell assets and has identified 25 projects that are fit to be offloaded, mostly in the roads sector.