If you lived,earned and learned, as I did, about India's US$10 billion Edtech sector, there's no way you didn't hear the story of the company that cried wolf . WhiteHat Jr may have generated bad press for its outlandish sales tactics or its (then) eyebrow-raising sale to Byju's for US$300 million, but there's no getting around the fact that it put the 1:1 coding class on the map. A slew of similar Edtechs followed suit, grew their user base and ultimately sold to bigger companies hungry to add new target groups to their business. Parental FOMO around "coaching for coding" is now a familiar bet for investors, as it is a sound business model. Not to mention—coding education in India is in the midst of a boom. The addressable market is pegged at ~20 million students across the country. But like all branches of edtech, the "next what" question looms over coding companies. Or rather, it's a "next who" question. Too stiff yet to pivot, the coding incumbents are offering highly-priced courses to a fraction of the student population that actually needs to learn to code. Not just highly-priced, says an industry insider, but also courses that have little distinction in the way they're set up, whether it be product, curriculum, or pedagogy. There's a wide swathe of opportunity here to create a different, local, regional language curriculum -- one that can benefit students from a varied economic background. That's our newsletter article today. About how the incumbents are being challenged by contenders. Contenders who've tweaked the language context and size of their classes to teach a completely new demographic of students. With the new National Education Policy being implemented on a tear, it's these newer, more inclusive efforts that we should keep our eyes on.
