Why We Built Eklavya

A Letter to Every Student Who Was Told They Weren't Good Enough

I was sixteen when I paid ₹60,000 for a dream.

That money came from years of my parents' savings, from the kind of sacrifices that middle-class Indian families know all too well. The promise was simple: pay this fee, attend these classes, and you will become a doctor. You will escape the cycle. You will make something of yourself.

I was a NEET aspirant, one among millions of teenagers in this country who wake up at 5 AM, attend school, rush to coaching, return home at 10 PM, and study until their eyes burn. I secured a good rank. I should have been celebrating. Instead, I watched my dream slip away because of family circumstances that had nothing to do with my score or my potential.

That ₹60,000? Gone. The additional ₹6,000 I paid to Physics Wallah? Gone too. What remained was a bitter understanding: the coaching industry doesn't care whether you succeed. It cares that you pay.

The Numbers Nobody Talks About

The coaching industry in India generates ₹58,000 crore annually, projected to reach ₹1.3 lakh crore by 2028. Let that sink in.

For NEET, over 20 lakh students appear every year, competing for roughly 1.4 lakh medical seats across government and private colleges. That is a 7% acceptance rate, and it drops drastically if you only count affordable government seats.

For JEE, around 12 lakh students appear for JEE Mains annually. Of these, only about 2.5 lakh qualify for JEE Advanced. And from those 2.5 lakh, roughly 17,000 get into an IIT. That is an acceptance rate of about 1.4%. If you calculate from the original 12 lakh, it is barely 1%.

Parents spend ₹1 lakh to ₹3.5 lakh per year on coaching fees alone. Add hostel costs in Kota or Hyderabad, study materials, test series, and supplementary courses, and families easily spend ₹5 to 7 lakh over two years. Many take loans. Many mortgage assets. Many sacrifice everything.

And for what?

In Kota, 26 students died by suicide in 2023, the highest ever recorded in the city's history. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, student suicides in India have risen 82% since 2011. Research shows that 85% of coaching students in Kota spend six to seven hours daily just in classes. More than 80% reported wanting at least one day off for leisure, something most never receive.

These are not statistics. These are children. Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. Children writing notes saying, "I can't do JEE. I am a loser."

No child should ever feel like a loser for not cracking an exam that only 1% pass.

The Predators

I call them predators because that is what they are.

The coaching industry preys on the deepest anxieties of Indian families: the fear of mediocrity, the desperation for upward mobility, the belief that engineering or medicine is the only respectable path. They conduct scholarship tests designed to make average students feel special, only to charge full price when the scholarship mysteriously doesn't materialize. They promise results they cannot deliver, taking credit for students who succeed through their own hard work while forgetting the thousands who fail.

I know this because I lived it. I was the student who paid ₹60,000 to a coaching center and another ₹6,000 to Physics Wallah, and received outdated study materials, overcrowded classrooms, and teachers who cared more about batch rankings than whether I actually understood the concepts.

The truth is brutal: the coaching industry's business model depends on your fear, not your success.

Why We Built This

Today, something remarkable has happened in India. We have more smartphones than we ever imagined. Internet penetration reaches villages that don't have proper roads. A farmer's daughter in rural Bihar has access to the same information as a businessman's son in South Delhi.

Yet quality education for competitive exams remains locked behind paywalls only the privileged can afford.

This contradiction haunted me. It haunted Dr. Aniruddha Malpani too. The vision for Eklavya was his brainchild, born from a simple idea: if we have the technology to deliver quality learning to every corner of India, why are we letting coaching centers charge ₹2 lakh a year for information that could be delivered through a smartphone?

Dr. Malpani didn't just envision Eklavya. He funded it entirely. Not as an investment with expected returns, but as a mission. He believed that the brightest minds in India should not be filtered by their parents' bank accounts.

I need to be honest about what Eklavya is. It is a one-person operation. I am the developer who writes the code. I am the QA who tests every feature. I am the customer support who responds to feedback. I am the person who reads the criticism on social media, sometimes harsh, sometimes unfair, sometimes absolutely valid, and stays up until 3 AM fixing bugs.

This is not a well-funded EdTech startup with hundreds of engineers. This is a mission held together by conviction, funded by one man's generosity, and built by someone who remembers exactly how it feels to be a student whose dreams were priced out of reach.

The Moment I Knew It Mattered

I visited a remote village in Bihar, a place people call the "IIT Factory" because of the surprising number of students who crack competitive exams despite having almost nothing in terms of resources. I went there to introduce Eklavya, to show them what we had built.

But when I arrived, they were already using it.

Students in a village with intermittent electricity and patchy internet had found Eklavya on their own. No marketing had reached them. No influencer had told them about us. They had simply searched for free JEE preparation, found our platform, and decided it was worth their time.

I stood there, in a small room with concrete walls and plastic chairs, watching teenagers navigate physics modules on phones with cracked screens, and I understood for the first time that what we were building actually mattered.

What Keeps Us Going

Today, 40,000 to 45,000 students are actively learning on Eklavya JEE. I will not claim this is tremendous success. I will not pretend we have disrupted the industry. But 45,000 students who might otherwise have no access to structured, science-backed preparation are now learning. For free. Without their parents having to mortgage their homes.

We have since launched Eklavya NEET and Eklavya NCERT. I will be honest: these platforms are not as polished as our JEE offering. The user traffic there is lower. We are still iterating, still improving, still learning.

But they exist. And every day, students are using them.

We keep getting messages. A father writes that his daughter uses Eklavya every day after school. An aunt says her nephew's confidence has grown since he started practicing on our platform. A government school teacher recommends us to her students because she knows their families cannot afford anything else.

These messages light up our days. They remind us why we do this. They make the criticism bearable and the long nights worthwhile.

An Invitation

If you are a student reading this: you are not alone. Your worth is not determined by an entrance exam. Your future is not sealed by a rank. The system is broken, but you are not.

If you are a parent reading this: question every rupee you spend on coaching. Ask what you are paying for. Demand transparency. Understand that expensive does not mean effective.

And if you want to try learning the way it should be, scientific, structured, and free, Eklavya is here. It is not perfect. It is built by one person who sometimes makes mistakes. But it is built with love, with research, and with the unwavering belief that no child's potential should be limited by their parents' income.

eklavya.io

Choose your exam. Start learning smarter. Always free.

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With hope,

Roshan

Builder of Eklavya