Vinod Kumar Bansal, a freshly minted mechanical engineer from Banaras Hindu University (now IIT BHU), landed in the industrial city of Kota in Rajasthan, around 240 km from the capital Jaipur, in 1971, with a job at JK Synthetics. But a few years into the job, he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, a hereditary muscle disease for which there is no cure. It killed his dream to become a chief engineer. As the disease worsened and restricted his movements, Bansal was unable to keep up with his day job.
He was already helping neighbourhood students prepare for entrance tests for engineering courses, and as his disease progressed, Bansal decided to pursue this part-time hobby in a more meaningful way. In the early 1980s, he started teaching eight students sitting around his dining table. In 1983, when his company shut down, Bansal started teaching full-time. Some of his students got into the IITs and word spread that “Bansal sir” had a magic touch.
Soon, parents in Kota, and then from outside Rajasthan, sought his help. In 1991, Bansal Classes was born. Soon enough, students flocked to Kota from all parts of India. Bansal Classes became a rage, and imitators sprang up. As students poured into the little Rajasthani town, hostels, tiffin centres and other logistics were developed to service these teenagers. The city transformed from a sleepy industrial small town into India’s coaching capital as a tsunami of coaching centres took over the landscape. Today, there are more than 150 coaching institutes in Kota, catering to around 2,00,000 students aspiring to get into elite engineering and medical colleges in the country. The city is considered a Mecca for engineering hopefuls whose main focus is to secure a seat in one of the Indian Institutes of Technology.
Here’s the catch, though. In 2023, according to Professor Bishnupada Mandal, organising chairperson of the Joint Entrance Exams ( JEE Advanced) 2023, there were 17,385 seats across the 23 IITs and more than 1.1 million students competing for them. Those who can’t secure a seat in IITs have to settle for other less elite engineering colleges. But Kota gives you a better shot than most. Every year, tens of thousands of students from Kota’s coaching centres clear the JEE Mains exams.
In 2023, four students from Kota made it to the top 10 ranks. It is not surprising then that these coaching institutes wear all-India rankings (AIR) as a badge of honour. Equally unsurprising is the fact that many of these institutes have an internal selection process, including an entrance test, to ensure their own quality of intake. The competition, and the fear of missing out (FOMO), are fierce. Under the circumstances, anyone making a tonic to help a child’s memory will make a killing. The places of worship in Kota receive huge donations every year from grateful and hopeful parents. The education technology companies took it to yet another level when it came to exploiting this FOMO.
When Byju’s launched its Learning App in 2015, it started by offering programmes in maths and science for students from grades 8 to 12 and programmes for CAT, UPSC and GMAT. The pitch was that because there was so much focus on exams and marks, students forgot the art of learning, and the sheer fun associated with it. Memorising and regurgitating in exams was, and still is, the norm. But Byju’s said that making children learn concepts as early as grade 8, would make them future-ready for IITs and IIMs. Over the years, the company has kept launching programmes for even younger children and it has pushed the “sooner-you-startthe-better-the-odds-your-child-has-at-clearing-IIT/IIM/ NEET” pitch to their parents.
This “catch them young and make them future-ready” strategy was also milked by companies like WhiteHat Jr and Clever Harvey. WhiteHat Jr claimed that the future belonged to the creators. “Any job that doesn’t involve a level of creation will be automated,” was founder Karan Bajaj’s favourite line to say in media interactions. The company launched courses that taught coding to children as young as six. It also went berserk with advertisements that depicted a fictional nine-year-old “Wolf Gupta” earning a 10-figure salary by coding at a global tech conglomerate. If this wasn’t enough, Clever Harvey took it a notch further by launching 15-hour “junior MBA” courses for teenagers. Edtech offerings during the pandemic became so absurd that it became difficult to tell the difference between a fact and a meme.
In the initial years at Byju’s, the focus was on making sales and getting business. The company hired young graduates from engineering schools and deployed them in tele-calling. These callers would introduce themselves as IIT graduates and talk to parents about the future of their children. “This was 2016, and we could do anything to make the sale,” one former employee, “Amit” (the name has been changed on request), who had joined the company as an intern in 2016 and rose through the ranks to become a manager, told me. “No one was monitoring the calls and it was a free pass. We just had to make the numbers.”
Managers, at least those in Bengaluru, were given a weekly party budget and were encouraged to take the team out once a week and bond over drinks. “The real job of the managers started after 10 pm on our weekends. They would take us out for drinks, figure out the people with the best numbers and manipulate them to stick around, and do even better,” Amit said. Often the young telemarketers would say they wanted to pursue higher studies. Their managers would tell them that this was a futile ambition. Their logic: eventually a higher degree would help somebody get a job somewhere in some company where they would have to start again from scratch.
At Byju’s, in comparison, they were equal stakeholders. The “vibe”, the autonomy they got at Byju’s, was something they wouldn’t get anywhere else. Plus, instead of taking time off to study, if they stuck around with Byju’s, they would make better money and climb up the corporate ladder faster. Interns were given examples of other employees who had cracked the sales code and made it big. “It was like those motivational speeches at the MLM (multi-level marketing) companies where they tell you how XYZ made it big and how you can do the same,” said Amit. “Managers manipulated these interns who, in turn, would manipulate parents so they would end up buying the product. Exploiting FOMO would be the starting point. They would end up shaming and threatening the parents till they submitted and signed up their children.”
Excerpted with permission from ‘The Learning Trap: How Byju’s Took Indian Edtech For a Ride, Pradip K Saha, Juggernaut Books.