Rs 60,000 crore industry in PM's free coaching plan's crosshairs? Experts weigh in

The move to provide free coaching to millions of Indian students comes with big promises but also questions over execution. With a crowded coaching market, the initiative has sparked interest. India Today spoke to experts to understand the key challenges and what it will take to make the plan work at scale.

In Short

• Private coaching now functions as a parallel education system for many students
• Survey data shows coaching use and spending rise sharply at higher levels
• Experts say lectures alone cannot replace testing, guidance and doubt resolution

Rs 60,000 crore. That is roughly the size at which India’s coaching economy is often placed. It runs from the classroom centres of Kota and Delhi to a growing online market of test-preparation courses, subscriptions and one-to-one mentoring. Estimates following the Prime Minister’s announcement have put the wider coaching market between 58,000 crore and 70,000 crore.

It is against this backdrop that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement on August 15 needs to be viewed.

The Independence Day address by PM Modi at the Red Fort had an announcement that did not go unnoticed, a plan to provide free online coaching to students preparing for examinations such as NEET, JEE and UPSC.

It was through an Instagram reel that Prime Minister Narendra Modi adopted a Gen Z-style approach to announce a committee led by Nandan Nilekani, with the director of IIT Madras and a former ISRO chief among its members.

The committee has been tasked with addressing challenges in India’s examination system.

The question, however, is larger than whether coaching can be made free.

FREE COACHING, BIGGER QUESTIONS

Over the years, coaching classrooms have become closely tied to India’s examination system. The coaching industry, stretching from the national capital and Kota to emerging centres such as Sikar, has millions of students at its core, many of whom come from different states.

Almost 10% of the total coaching industry monetary share comes from the classrooms in Kota. The whole city and its economy revolve around one thing: coaching.

A large share of these students comes from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, making their presence in the coaching ecosystem hard to ignore. As competition for a limited number of seats has grown, private preparation has moved from being an advantage for some students to, in many cases, becoming a parallel education system.

The government now proposes to use India’s digital public infrastructure to build an alternative.

The plan is to bring students, teachers and learning material onto a common platform so that access to exam preparation is not determined entirely by geography or household income.

That proposition also raises questions about the limits of technology. A recorded lecture can travel across the country, but learning does not take place through content alone.

It depends on teaching, feedback, practice, doubt resolution and, in many cases, sustained human guidance.

The announcement also came with a plan to skill one crore young Indians in artificial intelligence over the next year, linking education with the changing demands of the labour market.

For policymakers, therefore, the larger test is not access alone. It is whether the state can build a system that can match what students currently seek from private coaching - structure, accountability, practice and guidance - without reproducing the same barriers in another form.

That is where the harder questions begin: who will teach, how will quality be measured, how will students be supported and, most importantly, whether free access can lead to better outcomes rather than simply more content.

What does the dream of free coaching actually look like?

In India, free cannot merely mean free video lectures.

It has to mean access to quality faculty, structured courses, study material, testing, doubt resolution, mentorship, counselling and guidance, the entire preparation ecosystem. This distinction matters because coaching has gradually stopped being just about teaching a chapter. It has become mentorship.

India’s own data illustrates how deeply private coaching has entered the education system. The Comprehensive Modular Survey of Education 2025 found that 27% of students enrolled in school education had taken or were taking private coaching during the academic year.

The proportion rose to 37.8% at the secondary level and 37% at higher secondary level. In urban India, 30.7% of students reported private coaching, compared with 25.5% in rural India.

The financial burden is equally revealing. Average annual expenditure on private coaching was 2,409 per student, rising to 9,950 among urban higher-secondary students.

So the problem is real. But the answer cannot simply be a larger library of videos.

Dinesh Gupta, founder of Vikalp Education, takes the sceptical view. He calls the announcement “very cosmetic”, arguing that there is no sufficiently concrete implementation plan and that communities need to be involved rather than assuming that bringing in a few teachers will solve the problem.

He says "it requires a back and forth approach, infrastructure building is one big challenge and alone the lectures available online cannot help."

That criticism deserves attention.

Can the government replicate the mentorship economy that private coaching has built?

This is perhaps the biggest challenge.

A student does not necessarily pay a coaching institute only for lectures. They pay for a timetable, tests, rankings, doubt solving, personal attention, peer pressure, motivation and someone who keeps asking: How are you preparing?

That is why the government's biggest competition may not actually be the coaching classroom. It may be the accountability structure around the classroom.

The government already has a precedent for regulating this sector. In January 2024, the Ministry of Education issued guidelines for coaching centres covering registration, fees, infrastructure, teacher-related standards, grievance mechanisms and student mental well-being. The guidelines were sent to states and Union Territories for implementation through an appropriate legal framework.

The fact that the government was still discussing regulation of unregulated coaching centres in Parliament in August 2026 shows the scale of the challenge.

"Greater access to coaching can also lead to greater participation, particularly among students from smaller towns and cities and families that may not be able to afford established coaching programmes," opines Avinash Agarwal, Director, Disha Publication.

Who should constitute the new teaching ecosystem?

This question could determine whether the initiative succeeds or becomes another government content portal.

The answer cannot simply be “government teachers”.

Competitive examinations require subject expertise, examination strategy, pedagogy, test analysis and familiarity with changing patterns.

The strongest model may therefore be a hybrid one: experienced teachers, independent educators, universities, industry experts, existing education platforms and government institutions working together under transparent standards.

Interestingly, the private education ecosystem itself has not uniformly opposed the announcement. Physics Wallah founder Alakh Pandey publicly welcomed the initiative and offered unconditional support, while stressing that execution would ultimately matter.

Union Education Minister Pralhad Joshi subsequently reviewed implementation of the initiative, with the proposed focus shifting towards a national platform providing quality learning content, expert guidance and structured preparation.

That is an important evolution from the original announcement.

Is coaching reform enough, or does India need to rethink the examination ecosystem itself?

This is where the debate becomes uncomfortable.

India can make coaching free and still leave the underlying examination system untouched.

Ayush Nambiar, Political Analyst and Policy Expert, puts the larger question sharply: free coaching could become an attempt to dismantle the invisible toll-gates between talent and opportunity, but only if execution prevents the initiative from becoming another expensive government portal with little impact on the ground.

"If executed with rigour, this could achieve something quietly revolutionary: make ambition less hereditary, opportunity less purchasable, and merit genuinely democratic," he opines.

If students continue to compete for a tiny number of seats, if examination uncertainty persists, if paper leaks undermine trust, if school education does not adequately prepare students for competitive examinations and if families continue to believe that a coaching centre is essential for survival, the demand for private coaching will not disappear.

It may simply change shape.

Avinash Agarwal, similarly argues that free access to quality teaching needs to be supported by dependable books, structured study material, previous-year questions and regular practice.

"Free access to quality teaching, supported by dependable study material and regular practice, can give students a more complete preparation pathway," he adds.

That may ultimately be the correct way to judge the initiative.

The question is not whether India can provide free lectures. It can. The question is whether India can provide free outcomes-enabling infrastructure.

If the government succeeds in bringing together high-quality teachers, digital infrastructure, testing, mentorship, counselling and reliable study material, it could genuinely weaken the economic barrier surrounding competitive examinations.

But if “free coaching” becomes synonymous with a collection of videos, the private coaching industry will remain largely untouched.

The real reform, therefore, is not to make coaching free.

- Ends