With the next half billion students and learners coming from rural India, vernacular edtech is on a steady rise. Can it scale despite challenges?
Tarun Saini of Vidyakul has hired local teachers, who sit out of studios in their respective locations and teach in different languages
Image: Madhu Kapparath
As an 11th grader, Tarun Saini, a resident of Pounti, a small village close to Ambala, Haryana, had to travel about 30 km every day to get to school. The government school at Pounti only provided subjects for the arts stream, and Saini had to travel by bus for an hour-and-a-half to study at a school that offered science subjects.
Location was only one part of the struggle. “One of my classmates scored 93 percent in her 10th grade. Her parents didn’t allow her to take up science because of the distance and financial struggles,” recalls Saini. Hindi-medium government schools in cities like Ambala didn’t have the best infrastructure, leaving students no choice but to go to tuition classes—an additional cost for families struggling to make ends meet.
Saini was one of the lucky few: He got a scholarship and went to study business at Monash University in Australia. Soon after he started working in the education sector there, he realised the gap the Indian education market continued to face in providing quality education in regional languages, catering to ‘Bharat’.
According to experts, the next phase of growth in all industries will be enabled by vernacular. The big customer base is the core middle class, emerging middle-class families in Tier II and III cities, where Hinglish and vernacular languages are spoken. “This demographic, also called the ‘Next Half Billion (NHB)’, consists of nearly 528 million people. The NHB segment is expected to drive the growth of the K12 edtech, creating a $400 million opportunity (out of $1.7 billion),” says Narasimha Jayakumar, managing director, Brainly India, a doubt-solving platform.
As per Nielsen’s Bharat 2.0 Study, there has been a 45 percent growth in active internet users since 2019. Rural India has 352 million internet users, of which almost 60 percent are not actively using the internet. The room for growth is massive. Within the edtech space, deeper penetration within the vernacular languages is key. “Vernacular offerings work well in bridging the divide between ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’, creating a massive opportunity for startups addressing this target audience,” says Ashwin Raguraman, co-founder and partner at Bharat Innovation Fund, which has also invested in vernacular edtech startup Pariksha.
(This story appears in the 01 July, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)