Late SHYAM MOTWANI and his son Subhash Motwani, who own & run RBCS Group, have been fighting for the cause of students for many years now. As a part of their Student Welfare Department activity, the father-son duo have been writing to the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) complaining against vocational institutes advertising false claims and affiliations to foreign universities. Besides communicating with ASCI, the Motwanis have also been regularly informing these foreign universities about fake advertisements, and have been fairly successful in their endeavour.

“Though we run vocational courses ourselves, we have at no point tried to induce students into joining courses that they don’t have aptitude for,” says Motwani senior, explaining that “we often tell students straight away that they are not capable of achieving their desired aims, and that they should not pursue such impossible dreams. “Though the ASCI has tried its best to correct these malpractices, one hasn’t seen any great change or betterment from these institutes themselves,” Subhash says.

The Motwani success story can be related as far as 1950’s when Mr Shyam came to India as a refugee from Sind, Pakistan and began his career as a tuition teacher in 1950, graduating over years to become the Director of the one of the city’s biggest, and most popular vocational institutes. ” My aim was always to discover simplified teaching methods in order to train even the otherwise weak students,” he says revealing that initially he would tutor school and college drop-outs, or those who had failed at their first attempts in their SSC and HSC examinations. Precisely 13 years after he started out as a private tutor, in 1963, he was approached by the Narialwala Agiary Trust to conduct classes at their premises in Mahim. |”So I started out with vocational courses like Drawing, First Aid and training for Hindi Public examinations, which would make the students very self­ reliant in their careers. The one approach I have used all through my years of teaching is the ‘Earn While You Learn’ strategy by means of which students enrol for practical part-time courses while working in the same area, thus earning money while learning their chosen skill. This was absolutely essential at a time when the cost of living has exceeded the income a person was earning.”

Eventually his centre for learning became more popular, and Motwani introduced more courses, like Radio Repairs, Watch Repairing, and other such technical courses. In 1971, he acquired a premise in Colaba, which has become his head office, and where courses other than just technical are being taught.

“At Colaba, we began courses like Travel & Tourism, Advertising, Interior Decoration, and Secretarial courses,” he says adding, “We also started an advertising agency here called Schnell Hans Advertising, and then a youth magazine called Opportunities Today”.

What sets his courses distinctly apart from those of other institutes is Motwani’s stress on workshop training with practical assistance from professors who are actually professionals from the industry. That, he says is what has made his institute as mammoth as it is today.