The Infrastructure Is Already There
600 million smartphones.
The school is in every pocket. Nobody opened it.
The standard argument against online education in India has always been access — that the rural poor do not have smartphones, that internet connectivity is unreliable in villages, that the digital divide makes online schooling a privilege of the urban middle class. That argument was partially true ten years ago. It is no longer true today — and the data makes this unambiguous.
India has over 600 million smartphone users. Mobile data costs approximately ₹10 per gigabyte — the cheapest in the world, by a significant margin. The ASER 2020 report found that smartphone ownership among government school families had risen from 30% in 2018 to 56% in 2020, and private school family ownership from 50% to 74% — a doubling in two years driven by the pandemic. India's own government DIKSHA platform — the Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing — already has over 200 million registered users, hosts thousands of courses, and operates at a scale that most private edtech companies have not reached. The government knows online education works. It has built one of the world's largest online learning platforms. And yet it continues to build physical schools while the online infrastructure sits underutilised and the private sector that could take it to the next level is treated with suspicion rather than as a partner.
"In 2022, students in India spent over 950 million hours on primary and secondary education apps. The demand is real. The technology exists. The only thing missing is the policy framework to let it work." — Observer Research Foundation, June 2026
600M
Smartphone users in India — the school is already in their pockets
950M hrs
Hours spent on education apps by Indian students in 2022 alone
$11.5B
Projected Indian edtech market by 2027 — if not choked by regulatory uncertainty
The Paradox India Has Not Acknowledged
The government knows it works.
And still builds bricks.
The Central Paradox of Indian Education Policy 2026
What the data says
- 200M users on government's own DIKSHA platform — online education at massive scale already works
- 950M hours spent on education apps annually — students choose online willingly
- 56% of government school families own smartphones — access is no longer the primary barrier
- ₹10/GB data — cheapest in the world; internet cost is not a barrier
- JEE/NEET students spending 5+ hours daily on edtech platforms — highest-stakes exams prepared online
- $5.76B edtech market — private sector has proven the model at scale
What the policy does
- Continues building physical schools at ₹1-2 crore per school while ignoring the online infrastructure that could reach the same students for ₹100 per child
- Regulates edtech as e-commerce — treating online education the same as selling shoes online, with no dedicated framework
- No recognition pathway for online school credentials — online learning does not count toward formal qualifications
- Threatened mandatory regulation after bad actors in the sector — penalising the entire industry for the behaviour of a few
- DIKSHA underinvested — the government's own platform has 200M users and a fraction of the resources it needs to become what it could be
- State-level barriers — 28 states, 8 UTs, each with different rules, making national scale impossible for any private player
The Five Barriers Government Has Built
Nobody banned online education.
They just made it impossible to scale.
⚖️
Regulated as E-Commerce, Not Education
India currently regulates edtech companies under consumer protection and IT laws designed for e-commerce — because no dedicated edtech regulatory framework exists. This means an online school is legally equivalent to an online retail platform. It creates absurdities: an edtech company's content cannot qualify for educational recognition, its certificates cannot be used for formal admissions, and its quality cannot be assessed by any education body because education regulators have no jurisdiction over online-only institutions. The private player who wants to run a genuine online school has no legal category to inhabit.
📜
No Credential Recognition for Online Learning
A child who completes Class 10 or Class 12 through a private online platform cannot use that credential for university admission in most states. The credential recognition system — controlled by state boards and the CBSE/ICSE frameworks — has no pathway for online-only education. This is the single most important barrier: it means that no matter how good the online education product is, students from low-income families who cannot afford private physical schools cannot use online learning as a genuine alternative because it leads nowhere officially. The middle class uses online as a supplement. The poor need it as a replacement — and the system prevents that.
🗺️
28 States × 8 UTs = 36 Separate Regulatory Environments
Education is on the Concurrent List of the Indian Constitution — both central and state governments can legislate on it. In practice this means that a private edtech company seeking to operate across India must navigate 36 different regulatory environments, with different content requirements, different languages, different curriculum frameworks, and different approval processes. A company that wants to serve a student in Bihar and a student in Tamil Nadu simultaneously must comply with two entirely different regulatory frameworks. This fragmentation makes national scale — the only scale at which online education's cost economics work — effectively impossible for any but the largest players with massive legal budgets.
📺
The Bad Actor Problem Used to Punish the Good Ones
The collapse of Byju's, the regulatory complaints against aggressive sales practices by several edtech companies, and the misleading advertising in the sector — all real and legitimate concerns — have created a political environment where regulation is seen as the solution to problems that were actually about specific company behaviour, not the model itself. Edtech regulation designed to punish Byju's will inevitably also punish Khan Academy, DIKSHA, and every legitimate online education provider in India. The lesson from every other sector is that bad actor problems require targeted enforcement, not industry-wide regulatory barriers that primarily harm the compliant players.
💰
No Government Subsidy Flows to Online Learning
The direct student subsidy argument from Letter 62 applies with even greater force here. Currently, government education subsidies flow exclusively to physical institutions — government schools, government colleges, government hostels. A child from a low-income family who wants to use an online platform to study cannot access any government financial support for doing so. The subsidy system structurally reinforces physical education and structurally excludes online education, regardless of quality comparison. This is not a market failure. It is a policy failure that the government has the power to fix tomorrow.
What Government Should Actually Do
Simple things.
Extraordinary results.
The policy agenda for unleashing online education in India is not complicated. It does not require new legislation, new institutions, or new budgets. It requires five specific decisions — each one removable by executive action, each one within the current government's authority to implement without Parliamentary approval.
①
Build Low-Cost Physical Infrastructure — Device + Connectivity, Not Classrooms
The government's proper role in online education is not to deliver it — it is to ensure the physical infrastructure that makes delivery possible. A ₹5,000 crore programme to put a tablet and a WiFi connection in every government school in India would cost less than building 2,500 new schools and would reach every child in every existing school simultaneously. The private sector handles the content, the curriculum, the teaching, and the assessment. The government handles the device and the pipe. This is the division of labour that actually works — each party doing what it is structurally best placed to do.
②
Create a National Online School Credential — One Recognition Framework
Establish a central accreditation body — under the new Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan — specifically for online school and college credentials. Any accredited online platform's Class 10, Class 12, or degree credential is recognised for university admission and government employment on the same basis as a physical institution's credential. This single policy change transforms online education from a supplementary activity into a genuine alternative pathway. The child in rural Bihar who cannot access a good physical school can now access the best online school in India and emerge with a credential that actually opens doors.
③
Dedicated Edtech Regulation — Separate from E-Commerce
Create a dedicated regulatory framework for edtech — not as a barrier, but as a quality assurance mechanism. Accreditation standards for online education providers, minimum content quality standards, transparent pricing requirements, child data protection enforcement, and a clear credential recognition pathway. The framework should be designed to make the compliant players more competitive, not to make the non-compliant players feel regulated. The US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, the EU's Digital Education Action Plan, and Singapore's edtech standards all provide working models. India does not need to invent this — it needs to choose and implement.
④
Extend Direct Student Subsidies to Accredited Online Platforms
The direct student subsidy argument from Letter 62 applies immediately and directly here. Income-verified students should be able to use their education voucher at any accredited online platform — not just physical institutions. A student from a family earning below ₹2 lakh annually who chooses to study through an accredited online school rather than the local government school should receive exactly the same subsidy. This creates competition between physical and online institutions for the same students — and competition drives quality improvement in both.
⑤
Scale DIKSHA as the Open Public Platform — Let Private Players Build On It
DIKSHA with 200 million users is the most underutilised public digital asset in India. Open DIKSHA's API to accredited private edtech players — let them build curriculum, assessments, and teaching tools on top of the government's distribution infrastructure. The government maintains the network and the student data. Private players provide the quality content and the teaching innovation. The result is a national education platform that combines public reach with private quality — the same model that India's UPI payment infrastructure used to transform digital payments by opening a government network to private innovation.
India's Unified Payments Interface is the most successful government-private sector collaboration in the country's digital history. The government — through NPCI — built the payment infrastructure: the rails, the interoperability standards, the settlement system, the regulatory framework. Private companies — PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, CRED — built the applications, the user experience, the merchant networks, and the customer acquisition. The result: 400 million active UPI users, 14 billion transactions per month, and the most advanced retail payment system in the world, built at a fraction of the cost of any comparable government-only alternative.
The education equivalent is obvious and available. DIKSHA is the rail. The government built it, owns it, and reaches 200 million users through it. Accredited private edtech companies are the trains — they provide the quality content, the adaptive learning algorithms, the multilingual curriculum, and the teacher tools that DIKSHA cannot build at pace with private innovation. Open the API. Set the accreditation standards. Extend the student subsidy to cover usage. And watch what happens. The UPI parallel suggests the answer: 400 million learners on a world-class platform, built at public-sector cost with private-sector quality. India has already proved it knows how to do this. It just hasn't done it for education yet.
South Korea · K-MOOC
Government Platform, Private Content
Korea's national online learning platform hosts content from 150 universities. Government provides the infrastructure and credentialing. Universities and private providers supply the content. 3 million users. Credentials recognised for university credit transfer.
Estonia · Digital School
Every Student, Every Device
Estonia provided every student with a device and connectivity in the early 2000s — before smartphones existed. Result: the highest digital literacy in Europe, a startup ecosystem per capita that outperforms every country its size, and a government that runs entirely on digital infrastructure. The device investment paid back 100× in economic productivity.
Kenya · M-Shule
SMS-Based Learning at Scale
Before smartphones were universal, Kenya's M-Shule delivered education via SMS — the technology that already existed on every phone. 500,000 students in rural areas with no internet access used it. The lesson for India: meet students where they are, with what they have, not where you wish they were.
The Cost Comparison That Makes This Undeniable
A new government school in India costs approximately ₹1-2 crore to build — land, construction, furniture, initial equipment. It serves 200-500 students. The cost per student of building the school is therefore ₹20,000-1,00,000 — before a single teacher is hired, a single textbook bought, or a single electricity bill paid. An accredited online platform with the right government subsidy can serve the same student for ₹100-500 per year — covering device access support, content access, and assessment. The cost differential is 40 to 1,000 times. For the price of building one new school, India could put quality online education in front of every child in an entire district. The maths is not complicated. The political will to follow it is.
The Honest Read — What Online Cannot Replace and What It Can
Online education is not a complete replacement for physical schools — and any proposal that pretends otherwise fails to account for what physical schools actually provide beyond curriculum delivery. A school is a social environment. It develops collaboration, friendship, conflict resolution, and the experience of being part of a community. It provides nutrition through midday meal programmes. It is a safe space for children from difficult home environments. It is the primary social institution in many rural communities. None of these things are delivered by an online platform. The physical school is not going away — and for the youngest children especially, it should not go away.
What online education can replace is the curriculum delivery and the teaching function for the majority of learning hours — and this is where the current system is most broken. The typical government school in rural India has underpaid, under-supported, and sometimes absent teachers delivering outdated curriculum through methods that have not changed in decades. An online platform with adaptive learning, the best teachers in the country delivering video content, and AI-driven assessment can deliver better curriculum in those hours than most physical classrooms currently do. The honest model is hybrid: the physical school remains the community anchor, the social environment, and the nutrition delivery mechanism. The online platform delivers the academic content. Both do what they are best at. Neither tries to replace the other.
The Byju's problem deserves honest treatment because it is the main reason the government is cautious. Byju's aggressive sales tactics, predatory loan practices, and eventual collapse created a political environment where any private edtech initiative is viewed with suspicion. The honest response is that Byju's was a business model problem — aggressive customer acquisition funded by venture capital with no concern for learning outcomes — not an online education problem. Khan Academy, which delivers genuinely excellent free education online to millions, has no Byju's problem. DIKSHA has no Byju's problem. The regulatory response should target the business model failures — aggressive sales, loan coercion, misleading advertising — not the online education model itself. These are distinguishable. The government has chosen, for political reasons, not to distinguish them.
The NGE View
The verdict.
What We Believe
✓
The government's primary role in online education is infrastructure, not content. Devices, connectivity, and credential recognition — these are the three things only the government can provide at universal scale. Everything else — curriculum quality, teaching excellence, adaptive learning, multilingual content, assessment innovation — the private sector does better and faster. The division of labour is clear. The political will to accept it is not.
✓
The UPI parallel is the blueprint. India built the world's best retail payment system by building public infrastructure and letting private players innovate on top of it. The same model applied to DIKSHA — open API, accredited private content providers, government-backed credential recognition — would produce the same result in education: world-class quality at public-sector scale, built at a fraction of what physical infrastructure costs.
✓
Credential recognition is the single most important policy change available. When an accredited online school's Class 12 certificate is accepted by every Indian university for admission — on exactly the same basis as a physical school's certificate — the entire market transforms overnight. Low-income families who currently accept poor-quality physical schooling because online learning leads nowhere will suddenly have a genuine choice. That choice creates competition. Competition creates quality improvement. The government can do this with a regulatory notification. It has chosen not to.
✓
The cost case is overwhelming and should be made explicitly in every budget discussion. For the annual budget of building 500 new physical schools — approximately ₹500-1,000 crore — India could fund quality online education for 50 to 100 million additional students through accredited private platforms. This is not a marginal improvement. It is a categorical difference in scale. Every rupee spent building a school rather than expanding online access is a rupee that could have educated 100 times as many children. Somewhere, a child in rural India is sitting in front of a smartphone waiting for someone to open the school that is already in their hands.
The school without walls is not a futuristic concept. It is not a pandemic experiment that reverted to normal when the crisis passed. It is the natural next form of mass education in a country with 600 million smartphones, ₹10/GB data, the cheapest internet in the world, and 265 million children whose futures depend on the quality of what they learn. India built DIKSHA and reached 200 million users. India built UPI and transformed payments for 400 million people. India has every element required to build the world's largest and best online school system — the technology, the private sector capability, the government distribution infrastructure, and the student demand. The only missing element is the decision to stop building walls and start opening the school that is already in every pocket. That decision costs nothing. The failure to make it costs everything.
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— Pawan Bhatia · NextGen Economics · Bangalore, India