13/05/2022
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?
https://debeshi-gooptu.blogspot.com/2022/05/indias-edtech-boom-boon-or-bane.html