Last Updated on September 1, 2026 4:11 pm by INDIAN AWAAZ
By Richa Pandey
A student preparing for a competitive examination needs more than a lecture. She needs to know which lecture to watch, what to study next, whether she has understood the material, how to practise, where she is going wrong and what to do when she falls behind.
This distinction matters as India prepares to launch a proposed national platform offering free online coaching for competitive examinations. Announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his Independence Day address, the initiative aims to ease the financial burden of coaching on poor and middle-class families. Union Education Minister Pralhad Joshi has since reviewed the initiative’s implementation with officials from the Department of Higher Education. The platform is expected to offer aspirants across the country quality learning content, expert guidance and a structured approach to examination preparation.
The idea is important. For examinations such as NEET, JEE, SSC, banking and various government recruitment tests, preparation has increasingly become an ecosystem that many families cannot afford. Coaching fees are only one part of the cost. Students may also have to pay for test series, study material, accommodation and travel, or move to coaching hubs such as Kota and other major cities.
But if the proposed platform is to address this inequality, it must ask a more difficult question than whether coaching can be made free.
What does it actually mean to make preparation equitable?
India does not have a shortage of free educational content. Students can already find thousands of lectures, PDFs, previous-year questions, strategy videos and test-preparation resources online. What many students lack is not information, but the structure around information.
A five-hour lecture on organic chemistry may be freely available. But a student with weak foundations in chemistry may not know where to begin, which concepts she needs to learn first, or whether she has understood them well enough to move ahead. A free PDF can contain hundreds of questions, but it cannot tell a student why she is repeatedly making the same mistake. A mock
test can give a score, but the score becomes meaningful only when someone or something helps the learner understand what it means and what she should do next.
This is where the distinction between free content and free coaching becomes important.
If the proposed platform is merely a repository of lectures, it will add another library to an already crowded digital education landscape. If it is designed as a genuine public learning system, however, it could address an inequality that private coaching has long exploited: some students have an entire ecosystem built around their preparation, while others are expected to navigate the examination alone.
From Free Content to Guided Preparation
A good coaching programme does not simply deliver lessons. It creates a pathway. A national platform should therefore not require an aspirant to arrive knowing exactly what she needs. It should help her identify where she currently stands.
Diagnostic assessments could help students identify gaps in foundational knowledge before they begin intensive examination preparation. Based on these gaps, the platform could recommend learning sequences, practice material and revision schedules. A student with six months before an examination should not receive the same preparation pathway as someone with eighteen months.
This is particularly important for first-generation learners, whose families may have little experience of competitive examinations. For them, preparation questions are often broader than “Which chapter should I study?”
What is this examination really testing? Am I eligible? How competitive is it? How should I divide my time? Is my current score improving? Should I attempt another examination as well?
These are not peripheral questions. They are part of learning how to navigate an examination system.
Language as a Dimension of Educational Equity
A national platform cannot become equitable simply by making content available in Hindi and English. For many students, language determines whether complex ideas can be understood deeply enough to be applied. A student may be able to follow a translated lecture, but that does not necessarily mean she can reason through a difficult question in the same language.
This becomes even more important when the platform expands beyond examinations such as NEET and JEE to state-level recruitment and entrance examinations. Preparation for these tests often involves state-specific syllabi, local knowledge and examination patterns.
Multilingual access, therefore, should mean more than subtitles. Courses, study material, mock tests, explanations and doubt-solving must be designed with linguistic equity in mind. Students should also be able to move between languages rather than being locked into one.
The question is not simply whether the platform can translate content. It is whether a student who has studied predominantly in a regional language can receive preparation of the same depth and quality as a student studying in English.
Beyond Connectivity: Addressing the Digital Divide
There is also a danger in assuming that an online platform automatically democratises access. A student may own a smartphone but share it with two siblings. She may have mobile data but not enough to attend hours of live classes. She may have an internet connection but no quiet room in which to study. Electricity may be unreliable. Her phone may not have sufficient storage for large applications or downloaded videos.
For such students, “available online” and “accessible” are not the same thing.
The platform will therefore need low-bandwidth options, downloadable lessons and tests, audio formats, small file sizes and interfaces that function on basic devices. Recorded lessons should remain available for students who cannot attend live sessions.
Offline and computer-based access could be especially important in regions where connectivity is unreliable. Schools, colleges, libraries and community centres could also become spaces where students access devices, download material or take mock tests.
These should not be treated as additional features to be introduced later. They are central to whether the initiative actually reaches the students for whom it is being created.
Guidance beyond the Classroom
Perhaps the most difficult part of coaching to reproduce online is the human relationship around learning. Competitive-examination preparation can stretch across months and, sometimes, years. Students encounter poor scores, changing examination patterns, uncertainty about careers and the pressure
of repeated attempts. A platform that only delivers academic content may leave them with the same uncertainty with which they entered.
Mentorship need not mean giving every student a personal tutor. It could involve trained academic mentors, moderated peer groups, regular progress reviews and systems that identify when a student is consistently struggling.
It could also mean something even more fundamental: helping students understand that competitive examinations are not the only measure of their future.
A student who does not qualify for a particular examination should not leave the platform believing that she has failed at education itself. Information about alternative examinations, higher education, scholarships, vocational routes and other career pathways can help transform the platform from an examination-preparation service into a broader public resource for educational decision-making.
This is especially important because the objective of public education cannot be to reproduce the high-pressure culture of private coaching at no cost.
Evaluating Learning, Not Just Reach
The eventual success of the initiative should also be judged differently. The number of registrations or hours of video watched can make for impressive statistics, but neither tells us whether students are learning.
A more meaningful evaluation would ask: How many students are returning to the platform? Are they completing learning pathways? Are diagnostic assessments helping them identify gaps? How quickly are academic doubts resolved? Are mock tests improving performance? Which districts and groups are being reached? Are students using offline resources? Are regional-language courses being used at the same rate as English-language courses?
The government could publish anonymised data on these indicators and commission independent reviews of content quality, accessibility, language equity and data practices.
Most importantly, students themselves should have a voice in evaluating the platform. A public service designed for aspirants should be responsive to what aspirants experience when they actually use it.
The proposed initiative arrives at an important moment. India has spent years expanding digital access to education, but access to content has not automatically translated into equal learning opportunities. Two students can watch exactly the same free lecture and still have very different chances of learning from it.
One may have strong foundations, a quiet room, a private device, parents familiar with competitive examinations, access to test series and someone who can answer her questions. The other may have none of these. The lecture is free for both. The learning opportunity is not.
That is the gap the proposed platform has an opportunity to address.
The real measure of free coaching, therefore, will not be the number of lectures uploaded or the number of students who register. It will be whether a student who has never entered a coaching centre can log in and know where to begin, what to do next, how she is progressing and where to turn when she is stuck.
Because the question is not whether every young person can watch the same lecture. It is whether every young person has a fair chance of turning that lecture into a future.
Richa Pandey is an education researcher and educator currently working with the Ravi J. Matthai Centre for Educational Innovation at IIM Ahmedabad. She holds a PhD in Education from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. Her research interests include children’s literature, educational equity, inclusion and learning.