Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day address from the Red Fort, announced that the government would provide free online coaching to students preparing for competitive examinations.
The programme, according to the Prime Minister, would use India’s digital public infrastructure and teaching talent, reduce the financial burden on families and allow students to prepare while staying at home.
Should The Government Provide Coaching?
The private coaching industry in India has grown rapidly over the last two decades. It is a parallel education system, specialising in entrance examinations for medicine, engineering, management, government services and several other careers. A study on the growth of the coaching business in India pointed out that it has grown enough to cast a shadow on the formal education system. There is also a possible conflict of interest. The government, through different agencies, conducts or oversees many of the examinations for which it now proposes to provide coaching. The same broad system becoming both the examiner and the coaching provider may raise questions about fairness, even when there is no actual sharing of privileged information. Creating a large government coaching system seems to accept that the coaching race is inevitable, rather than attempting to reduce the need for it.
A clear institutional separation between examination bodies and any publicly supported coaching initiative will therefore be necessary. The National Education Policy 2020 had proposed reforming assessments to eliminate the need for coaching classes.
However, free online coaching by the government is not exactly a new idea. The PM eVIDYA platform already provides IITPAL lectures prepared by IIT professors for JEE and NEET. The National Testing Agency’s E-Abhyas offers test practice. There are also separate free or subsidised coaching schemes for Scheduled Castes, Other Backward Classes, De-notified Tribes and other disadvantaged groups. Thus, the government does not lack platforms or content. What is not very clear is how many students use these programmes regularly, complete them, and eventually succeed in the examinations. Coaching is not merely about lectures. A well-designed coaching programme involves a tight schedule, regular tests, doubt-clearing sessions, analysis of student performance, remedial inputs, and continuous follow-up. The better programmes also help students develop examination strategies and ensure that those falling behind are identified early. Providing recorded lectures, question banks, and automated tests to lakhs of students is possible at a reasonable cost. But providing individual feedback, mentoring, doubt resolution, and follow-up at that scale is a different matter. If these components are absent, the programme will remain a free learning platform, not a coaching programme. If they are included, the initiative will require a large number of competent teachers and mentors and will no longer be inexpensive.
The latest Comprehensive Modular Survey on Education in 2025 found that nearly a third of all Indian students had taken private coaching during the academic year. The proportion was 30.7% in urban areas and 25.5% in rural India. At the higher-secondary level, urban households spent an average of Rs 9,950 per student annually on private coaching, compared with Rs 4,548 in rural areas. SATHEE, developed by the Ministry of Education and IIT Kanpur, provides free preparation for JEE, NEET, CUET, and other examinations, and reportedly has over 15 lakh registered learners.
