The pandemic has catapulted India’s EdTech industry into the big league. Even as I write this post, an EdTech startup is probably being birthed in some part of India. Currently, there are more than 4500 EdTech companies in the country and the industry, valued at US$ 750 million in 2020, is expected to reach US$ 4 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 39.77%.
No small figure, this. In fact it was the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns that fuelled India’s EdTech boom. Schools and educational institutions had to switch to online learning with physical campuses being off limits. Tech-enabled learning became a winning proposition and more startups jumped onto the EdTech bandwagon. Right now, Byju’s is one of the leading companies followed by Unacademy, UpGrad, Toppr, Next Education, Meritnation among others.
I’d interviewed Byju Raveendran in 2016, a year after he had launched his company. He had explained that “online learning is not offline learning taken online by simply digitizing content. There is a lot of scope for technology to make learning better and more efficient.” Be that as it may, the real test of technology lies in whether it can improve the lives of people. And while urban India has clearly benefited from tech-enabled learning, have rural and underserved areas been able to make the switch smoothly?
A villager in Himachal Pradesh was forced to sell his cow as he didn’t have the money to afford a mobile phone for his children’s online lessons. His plight moved many to tears on social media and there was an outpouring of help to fund his children’s education.
Aishwarya Reddy, a mathematics student of Lady Shri Ram College for Women in Delhi was not so fortunate. She died by suicide recently as she couldn’t afford a laptop for her studies. The instalment of her scholarship that was due in March had been delayed and the student did not want to trouble her family for money. A resident of the Rangareddy district in Telangana, she was the state class 12 examination topper and had mortgaged her house to fund her higher education.
Out of the 1.26 billion children worldwide out of school due to the pandemic, over 320 million are in India. With a population of over 1 billion, the government has a challenging task in ensuring universal elementary education. While there has been an increase in the number of educational institutes in the country, especially over the last few years, the problem of literacy in rural areas and among the female population still remains unsolved.
Even though the government’s National Education Policy 2020 stresses on the importance of leveraging technology in education solutions and supporting creation of content in regional languages, it remains to be seen whether these firms will help bridge the digital divide effectively.
According to the IAMAI-Kantar ICUBE 2020 report, India had 622 million active internet users in 2020. This number is expected to increase by 45% to reach 900 million by 2025, due to higher adoption rates in rural India. Small towns in India account for two out of five active internet users in the country. Urban population comprises 67% of active internet users.
According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2020, smartphone ownership among government school student families increased from 30% in 2018 to 56% in 2020, whereas smartphone ownership among private school student families rose from 50% to 74%.
While these statistics present a hopeful picture, clearly a lot more ground needs to be covered to make sure access to education (and tech-enabled education) is equitable. Whether the EdTech phenomenon can deliver on its promises remains to be seen.
For now, firms such as Byju’s are weighed down by controversies regarding hard sells, prohibitive fees that only the upper crust can afford and toxic work culture. The need of the hour is effective regulation so that the benefits of this boom trickle down to the bottom where it is needed the most.
