In his 15 August 2026 Independence Day address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the government would provide free online coaching to young people preparing for competitive examinations. This would curb the growing ‘coaching culture’ and reduce the financial pressures on poor and middle-income families, he said.
In India, entrance to many sought-after public universities or government jobs is typically determined through common examinations. However, the preparation needed to compete successfully in these examinations is increasingly purchased in the market. The distinction is important. Although competitive examinations are usually understood to be fair because everybody answers the same questions under the same rules, not all students inside the examination hall arrive prepared under fair circumstances. Some have had access to specialised coaching institutions, where they can take repeated mock examinations and receive individual feedback. Others prepare from school textbooks, free online material or whatever guidance may be locally available.
Free online coaching therefore raises a larger question than whether a government portal can save families some money: whether free public provision can reduce the role of household resources in determining access to better preparation and thereby make competitive exams fairer.
When Preparation Comes at a Price
Over the last few decades, private coaching has become deeply embedded in Indian education. The National Statistical Office’s (NSO) Comprehensive Modular Survey on Education (CMS, 2025) found that 27 percent of school students were taking or had taken private coaching during the academic year. Participation was higher in urban India at 30.7 percent, compared with 25.5 percent in rural areas. At the higher-secondary level, average annual spending on private coaching was INR 9,950 per student in urban areas and INR 4,548 in rural areas.
There is no regular official national estimate of how many candidates for India’s major competitive examinations use private coaching. The clearest evidence available from 2016 comes from a Joint Implementation Committee report for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced, which found that coaching constituted the ‘mode of preparation’ for 30.27 percent of those registered, 40.73 percent of those who qualified and 44.54 percent of those eventually admitted to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Candidates who focused on self-study accounted for 65.67 percent of registrations but 52.37 percent of admissions.
The same report reveals a striking socioeconomic gradient: candidates reporting parental income of up to INR 100,000 constituted 27.76 percent of registrations but only 17.10 percent of admissions, while those reporting parental income above INR 800,000 accounted for 8.94 percent of registrations but 16.39 percent of admissions. These are descriptive associations, not evidence that coaching or income caused differences in outcomes. However, they show why unequal access to preparation cannot be treated as incidental to the examination system.
More recent evidence is less comprehensive but points in the same direction. In 2025, an analysis by IIT Kanpur showed that one in four students admitted to an IIT that year had prepared in Kota alone, and that around half of the top 100 JEE Advanced candidates had prepared there. Similarly, an Indian Express investigation contacted 38 of the top 50 National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) rank holders and found that 37 had taken coaching. This is revealing about the very top of the rank distribution, although not representative of all NEET candidates.
The 2021 Justice A.K. Rajan Committee report on NEET in Tamil Nadu went further, reporting that 99 percent of students who secured MBBS admission in the state in 2019-20 had received prior NEET coaching. The committee also estimated that more than 400 NEET coaching centres were operating in Tamil Nadu and valued the state’s coaching market at roughly INR 57.5 billion. An analysis in Economic and Political Weekly (EPW) in 2024 estimated the size of India’s coaching industry at INR 580 billion and projected it would cross INR 1 trillion in the coming years. The sector serves more than 70 million students across the country. In the same year, a parliamentary reply noted that GST collections from coaching services rose from INR 22.4 billion in 2019-20 to INR 55.17 billion in 2023-24.
While these numbers do not provide an exam-wise baseline of who currently receives paid coaching, how much households spend on it, and how coaching participation varies by income, gender, location or schooling background, they establish something important: purchasing supplementary instruction has become a routine feature of education for a substantial share of Indian families.
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The Premium Behind Coaching
The advantage associated with paid coaching can be understood through the idea of a ‘coaching premium’: the advantage gained from access to specialised preparation that may be unavailable, or available at lower quality, to candidates of similar ability. The premium does not arise merely from access to better lectures. Successful coaching institutions understand the examination, provide a timetable tailored to it, administer repeated tests, identify weaknesses, resolve doubts and tell students how their performance compares with that of thousands of competitors. What families are buying, therefore, is not just teaching, but also information, feedback and individual attention.
India’s free online coaching initiative can reduce inequalities in access to competitive-exam preparation, but its impact will depend on pairing wider access with personalisation and deeper reform of schools and selection systems
Once large numbers of aspirants make such an investment, coaching also begins to resemble a positional good. Even parents sceptical of coaching may feel compelled to purchase it because they fear the disadvantage their children might face if others do. The expansion of coaching therefore continues to generate its own demand, available only to those who can pay.
Building a Public Alternative to Private Coaching
Although a public system cannot remove every advantage associated with household income, it can try to limit the coaching premium by ensuring that high-quality, examination-specific preparation is available to all. Growing digital public infrastructure and increasing access to smartphones and the internet make this increasingly viable at scale. Self-Assessment, Test and Help for Entrance Examinations (SATHEE), developed by the Ministry of Education in collaboration with IIT Kanpur, already provides free preparation for JEE, NEET, Common University Entrance Test (CUET), Staff Selection Commission (SSC) examinations, and banking, railway and law entrance examinations. Its offerings extend beyond recorded lectures to daily practice problems, mock tests, self-assessment, interactive doubt-clearing and mentorship.
The Independence Day announcement should therefore not be interpreted primarily as a mandate to construct another education portal. The more consequential transition would be from a portal to a public coaching service. This distinction is crucial because while a portal can lower the cost of distributing information, a public coaching service needs to solve the harder problem of responsive, personalised learning. SATHEE has also introduced AI-based doubt resolution, personalised study plans and tools intended to identify conceptual problems.
The Wider Reform Fairness Requires
Going forward, three aspects will matter for enhancing fairness in competitive exams. The first is personalisation, where AI helps diagnose weaknesses, generate targeted practice and identify students’ learning gaps, and is paired with human mentors where technology is insufficient.
The second is access. India’s digital base is now large, but household access is not the same as individual control over a device, reliable connectivity or a quiet place to study. A national coaching service therefore needs to provide television-based instruction, materials that can be accessed offline, and access through schools, colleges and libraries alongside smartphones. Measuring continuous access—whether students keep using the service, whether their diagnostic scores improve, and, most importantly, whether the relationship between family resources and examination performance weakens—will be important.
Third is deeper education reform. Free coaching cannot fully compensate for weak schooling accumulated over twelve years. Neither can it alter the pressures created by scarce opportunities, when hundreds of thousands of well-prepared candidates compete for a limited number of desirable college places or jobs.
Finally, there is also a bigger risk. If the state expands its role in providing coaching without reforming the system that makes coaching indispensable, public policy could institutionalise the very coaching culture it is trying to soften. The long-term objective must continue to be better schools and universities, credible examinations, more pathways into higher education and employment, and selection systems that reward understanding rather than mastery of coaching techniques. Free online coaching should therefore be treated as an equity intervention, useful insofar as it reduces the extent to which the ability to pay determines the ability to prepare, but never a substitute for deeper reform of schools, universities and selection systems.
For a country that relies heavily on examinations to allocate some of its most sought-after educational and employment opportunities, a free public coaching service can reduce one important dimension of inequality: the extent to which the ability to pay determines the ability to prepare. But its value will ultimately depend on whether it complements, rather than substitutes for, deeper reforms to schools, universities and selection systems.
Arpan Tulsyan is a Senior Fellow with the Centre for New Economic Diplomacy at the Observer Research Foundation.
This article was originally published on the Observer Research Foundation website.