South Asia · country & exam lens

AI learning in India

Where the core Global-South insight lives: a regional-language majority the English-only imports structurally can't reach, and a price point one to two orders of magnitude below Western tutoring.

Exam systems

CBSE / ICSE + state boards — CBSE is the national NCERT-based board; ICSE runs Class 10 and ISC Class 12; plus numerous state boards.
JEE / NEET / UPSC — The high-stakes entrance exams — JEE (engineering, into the IITs), NEET (medical), UPSC (civil services).

Languages of the classroom

~260 million schoolchildren, predominantly regional-medium (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali…). English-medium share swings from ~73% (Tamil Nadu) to ~25–30% (Bihar/MP). Vernacular delivery reaches the next 100 million.

Price points

Physics Wallah courses start ~₹2,999, with fees pledged under ₹5,000 — the affordability disruptor that BYJU'S (which collapsed in 2024) lost to.

How students reach it (delivery channel)

Mobile-first on a basic smartphone plus mobile data, with a free-on-YouTube funnel — coexisting with the offline coaching-town culture (Kota).

How it’s used

Intense entrance-exam culture; the free-video-to-cheap-paid-batch funnel is the model.

Built for this exam

Physics Wallah — YouTube-origin JEE/NEET prep, deliberately the cheapest serious brand.
Embibe — Concept knowledge-graph prep across boards and JEE/NEET; now inside Reliance/Jio.
Doubtnut — Photo doubt-solving in Hindi and regional languages, mobile-first for Tier-2/3 towns.
Vedantu — Live interactive tutoring for boards and entrance exams.
Unacademy — Live-class marketplace across competitive-exam categories.