Jammu and Kashmir: 2 IIT engineers develop 'doubt clearing' online app for students

The two IIT alumni Imbesat Ahmad and Shadman Anwer developed the FILO app in 2020 to “help students instantly connect with the experts from the relevant fields and get their queries addressed”.

While Ahmad is from Bihar, Shadman hails from Delhi.

The two friends developed this app in Kashmir as Ahmad is the co-owner of RISE Institute in Srinagar where thousands of students are being trained to make it to competitive engineering colleges across India.

Scores of students from RISE have made it to IITs over the years.

“Due to COVID-19 pandemic, offline education came to a standstill and internet in Kashmir was also shut. We came with the FILO app as not every student is privileged to enroll for online classes,” Ahmad told Greater Kashmir.

“The app quickly gained popularity across the country and is now used by thousands of students.” He said that the pandemic left millions of students across India helpless without access to proper guidance and resources.

“Not everyone can purchase books or enroll themselves in expensive online courses. So, with the announcement of competitive exams, the anxiety of these students mounts as they are unable to garner the kind of support they want.
This results in endless trauma for the students and their families. Through this app, the students can prepare themselves without any worry,” Ahmad said.

He said the FILO started live one-to-one session for free, currently teaching over 40,000 students through around 3000 experts from top colleges of India. Ahmad has come up with another initiative in the app to help students with their specific needs: micro classes.

“To help students crack JEE and NEET, FILO has launched micro classes, a unique feature of the app (findfilo.com/download) that brings the cost of JEE and NEET preparation to as low as Rs 10. A lot of other courses are even free,” he said.

Ahmad, alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, said he had taught more than 10,000 underprivileged students from the remotest parts of Bihar to Kashmir right since he cleared IIT-JEE in 2010.

“Rich kids have many options but those financially-weak hardly find any quality online place to learn. So, at FILO, we want to bridge this gap and provide the best standard tutoring available for all,” he said.

Talking to Greater Kashmir, Anwer said someone with even 2G internet could avail coaching for free from India’s best tutors in an interactive way which was not available otherwise.

“The app runs even on low-speed internet,” he said. Anwer said that with the educational institutions mostly shut due to COVID-19, even a little guidance from a live teacher and expert keeps a student on the right track. The duo said that they had developed their own platform for data transmission to make it safe, secure and easy to use. “To ensure complete safety of data, we don’t use ZOOM or any other such support. Our platform is even ad free,” they said.