12 Days of Christmas Wishes — Part 10 — India

India is a very different situation than the U.S. or China. I will be out at the end of January, 2019 to see the latest. Like China, India parents care deeply about education and consider it their own job, not the job of schools. This has created an incredible amount of innovation and a largely private-pay market including about 50% of students in private schools and almost all children going to after school tutoring (called tuition).

The challenge with India has been infrastructure, with not enough people on smartphones and not enough with high bandwidth connections. This changed in 2016 with the introduction of Reliance Jio, a 4G system in all of the big cities in India at rates much lower than the incumbent providers were listing. This has caused a huge increase in the number of connected families, likely over 200 million new high bandwidth mobile users. We have started to see the result of that with a much better online economy including FlipKart, Snapdeal, and many others. In the last couple of years, education companies like Byju and Toppr have begun generating significant revenue.

So although India is always messy, and has been behind on infrastructure, it is likely to become the second biggest online education market after China in the next ten years.

If you are building or funding education companies in India, send me an email -john@danners.org. I would love to help!