On December 21, the Andhra Pradesh government distributed five lakh android tablets to Class 8 students in government schools on the occasion of Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy’s birthday. The tablets contained pre-loaded content from the edtech unicorn Byju’s. While the government claims that the initiative will help students in their studies, experts at a recent webinar on the impact of edtech, organised by Oxfam India, thought otherwise. The webinar discussed topics ranging from the implications of the Andhra government distributing tablets, to venture capitalists' interest in edtech, and how edtech cannot be a replacement for the public education system.
Investments in the edtech sector are growing in India. According to an Oxfam India study conducted in collaboration with IT for Change titled ‘Digital Dollar? An exploratory study of the investments by the IFC in the Indian Education Technology Sector’, the country is the second largest market, after the USA, in e-learning, attracting funds from venture capitalists as well as the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). The study found that the Indian edtech market saw rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. “India is now the second-largest market for e-learning in the world after the USA, and is projected to be worth over USD 3.5 billion by 2022. Edtech startups secured USD 16 billion in venture capital funding in 2020 alone, more than double the USD 7.1 billion funding in 2019. India has a total of five edtech unicorns, three of which emerged in 2021. The sector’s future evaluation is pegged at USD 30 billion (Rs 2,25,000 crore), which is more than double that of India’s education budget,” it stated.
The Oxfam study reasoned that the growth is fueled by the rapid increase in internet users in India, which had about 624 million active internet users by February 2021. “Even before COVID-19, 51.25% of the traffic share was from 10 edtech companies. The pandemic and the resulting growth of online education accelerated this trend. India had the second-longest school lockdown, which forced students towards a range of online solutions. There has been a 30% increase in the time spent on education apps on smartphones since the lockdown.” While edtech is considered capable of eradicating inequality as it is thought to be accessible to everyone, speakers at the Oxfam webinar pointed out that’s not the case. The findings of the Digital Divide India Inequality Report 2022 prove this right. “Only 31% of the rural population and 67% of the urban population use the internet. Only about 9% of students who were enrolled in any course had access to a computer with internet. And 25% of the enrolled students had internet access through any kind of device,” the report stated.
The speakers at the webinar, held on December 23, said that edtech should not be considered the only way forward in education. They included Binay Pathak, assistant professor in Economics at Lalit Narayan Mithila University; Anjela Taneja, Public Services and Inequality Policy and Advocacy lead at Oxfam International; and Gurumurthy Kasinathan, director of IT for Change, a Bengaluru-based non-profit.
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