On December 21, the Andhra Pradesh government distributed five lakh android tablets to Class 8 students in government schools on the occasion of Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy’s birthday. The tablets contained pre-loaded content from the edtech unicorn Byju’s. While the government claims that the initiative will help students in their studies, experts at a recent webinar on the impact of edtech, organised by Oxfam India, thought otherwise. The webinar discussed topics ranging from the implications of the Andhra government distributing tablets, to venture capitalists' interest in edtech, and how edtech cannot be a replacement for the public education system.
Investments in the edtech sector are growing in India. According to an Oxfam India study conducted in collaboration with IT for Change titled ‘Digital Dollar? An exploratory study of the investments by the IFC in the Indian Education Technology Sector’, the country is the second largest market, after the USA, in e-learning, attracting funds from venture capitalists as well as the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC).
The study found that the Indian edtech market saw rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. “India is now the second-largest market for e-learning in the world after the USA, and is projected to be worth over USD 3.5 billion by 2022. Edtech startups secured USD 16 billion in venture capital funding in 2020 alone, more than double the USD 7.1 billion funding in 2019. India has a total of five edtech unicorns, three of which emerged in 2021. The sector’s future evaluation is pegged at USD 30 billion (Rs 2,25,000 crore), which is more than double that of India’s education budget,” it stated.
The Oxfam study reasoned that the growth is fueled by the rapid increase in internet users in India, which had about 624 million active internet users by February 2021. “Even before COVID-19, 51.25% of the traffic share was from 10 edtech companies. The pandemic and the resulting growth of online education accelerated this trend. India had the second-longest school lockdown, which forced students towards a range of online solutions. There has been a 30% increase in the time spent on education apps on smartphones since the lockdown.”
While edtech is considered capable of eradicating inequality as it is thought to be accessible to everyone, speakers at the Oxfam webinar pointed out that’s not the case. The findings of the Digital Divide India Inequality Report 2022 prove this right. “Only 31% of the rural population and 67% of the urban population use the internet. Only about 9% of students who were enrolled in any course had access to a computer with internet. And 25% of the enrolled students had internet access through any kind of device,” the report stated.
The speakers at the webinar, held on December 23, said that edtech should not be considered the only way forward in education. They included Binay Pathak, assistant professor in Economics at Lalit Narayan Mithila University; Anjela Taneja, Public Services and Inequality Policy and Advocacy lead at Oxfam International; and Gurumurthy Kasinathan, director of IT for Change, a Bengaluru-based non-profit.
Gurumurthy said that when institutions such as the IFC actively fund edtech companies, it aggravates the problem. He said, “The World Bank group’s (IFC) primary role is not promotion of commercial entities but promoting public welfare, equity, and universal education. It is in that sense that IFC is funding edtechs in India, one of which is Byju’s. But our research has shown that IFC has not done due diligence in understanding who it should and should not fund. It just went by the claims of the company and did not understand what, particularly in the context of malpractices, these companies do.”
IFC has invested in five edtech companies since 2000, including the recent additions UpGrad (2021) and Byju’s (2016). The Oxfam study took issue with IFC’s investments in the edtech companies. According to it, “A review of the investee companies reveals that there are serious gaps between the work of these companies, and the priorities of Indian education, with respect to questions of access, affordability, and inclusion; adherence to labour, environment, and child protection standards; and quality of services. The larger impact of mainstream edtech risks diluting the role of the teacher and weakening the public education system.”
The study stated that IFC relied excessively on corporate self-declaration for its monitoring and assessment of the companies. IFC “appears to assume that the existence of policies is equivalent to compliance,” the study alleged, adding that there is inadequate assessment and monitoring of social risks. It assesses the companies risk mitigation capabilities “through ensuring the existence of policies and processes, such as the development of human resource policies, emergency response plans, safety standards, non-discrimination practices, etc.” The study said that it is not possible to analyse whether these companies comply with the policies simply based on their own reports and disclosures. One of IFC’s investees, edtech unicorn Byju’s, had made news after it pushed families into debt in the name of online courses with loan-based agreements that exploited parents and students.
The fall in government funding in public education is one of the reasons behind the increased acceptance for edtech companies, reasoned Binay Pathak. He said, “Since 1990, there has been a decrease in public funding in education, while slowly encouraging the private sector to run at a minimum cost. Education was privatised even before edtech. There was an informal market for coaching institutes, which edtech is capturing now. It is now entering into the formal market in education with the help of the government, initially as a support and then as a partner.”
The speakers also argued that venture capitalism and its tendency to drive companies to make abnormal profits is a key problem. With the rise in investments, edtech companies have begun to penetrate the formal education system. Yet, there is no mechanism for assessing these new technologies, said Anjela from Oxfam International. “It's essential to make the best use of tools available, but also recognize that it comes with limitations that are at times severe,” she said, adding that education is every citizen’s right and not merely a means of making profit.
The speakers recommended that the Indian government ban for-profit edtech companies as they are prone to abusive and unethical practices. Citing the example of China that banned for-profit edtech companies in 2021, the Oxfam study explained, “Indian law requires education institutions to be not-for-profit. While making a ‘reasonable’ surplus is permitted, profiteering continues to be prohibited.”
The speakers at the webinar suggested that data collection by these educational apps for business be strictly regulated, and algorithms should be open for scrutiny. Gurumurthy elaborated that the present state of affairs was such that data collection and data harvesting is easily possible. The study stated that it has been proven that “predatory data practices” were used by Byju’s to secure new clients. “Such practices can even lead to psychological manipulation of people. Education is a space where such manipulation is very dangerous,” Gurumurthy said. “In the Indian context, the lack of a data protection regime poses a huge risk to data security and privacy, which gets amplified when the data subjects are children, incapable of offering consent, and more vulnerable to exploitation,” the study stated.
The speakers cautioned that the distribution of tablets in Andhra Pradesh can give rise to data harvesting threats and also lead to digital addiction among students. According to Gurumurthy, “Every day, we see news about children with increased access to different digital devices being manipulated through online gaming and gambling. Young minds are vulnerable. So, putting devices in their hands and encouraging them to learn through tablets is not advisable. A physical learning environment would be much more helpful to them, and tablets can be a supplementary accessory to be used with the supervision of teachers. It's not something you give as primary material to students.”
Gurumurthy further added that digital addiction is an alarming phenomenon that has become parents' biggest worry of late. “It is very naive on the part of the Andhra government to think that the students would only be consuming some educational videos. App security and addiction issues are going to be a challenge,” he said.
Gurumurthy said that while edtech can provide opportunities for learners and teachers to access resources, update their own knowledge, and interact with one another, one should not consider that as education. “Education is a complex and holistic process, it's a bunch of people sitting together as a community with an adult facilitator, who challenges, provokes, and engages the students to stay motivated and learn. Learning is not the same as watching a video on YouTube. We think entertainment and education are similar, but they are not. Education requires continuous engagement,” he said.