– Avinash Agarwal, Director, Disha Publication

Every few years, a new solution arrives to fix Indian education. More schools. Better teachers. Affordable textbooks. Then the internet changed everything, or so it was said. Then smartphones. Then apps built by unicorns with billion-dollar mandates. Now, artificial intelligence. Each wave arrives with genuine conviction, serious capital behind it, and the same underlying assumption: that if students can only get access to better resources, learning will follow.

It has not followed. Not consistently, not at scale, and not in the ways that actually matter when a student sits down to solve a problem they have never seen before.

India’s national assessment body, PARAKH, released findings in July 2025 showing that foundational learning levels had not improved beyond where they stood in 2017. Nearly a decade of investment, and the needle on actual learning has barely moved. Enrolment is up. Infrastructure is expanding. The problem being solved, it turns out, is not the same as the problem that needs solving.

The Abundance Paradox

The edtech market in India is valued at over $5 billion today and is projected to cross $17 billion by 2030. Smartphone ownership in rural households leapt from 36 percent in 2018 to 84 percent in 2024. SWAYAM, the government’s open learning platform, has crossed four crore enrolments. By every conventional measure, the problem of access has been solved—and solved convincingly.

And yet students are not learning more deeply. They are simply encountering more material. For anyone who has spent decades building learning resources, that distinction is not a new observation. It is a confirmation of something the publishing world has quietly understood for some time: access and learning are not the same thing, and conflating the two has cost an entire generation of students more than anyone is willing to admit openly.

The Efficiency Trap

Student behaviour has shifted in ways that are easy to miss if one is not paying close attention. Across subjects, preparation has become sharply exam-optimised. Students are no longer asking themselves what they need to understand. They are asking what they need to answer. The two are not always the same question.

Nor is this a character failing. It is a rational response to incentives. When the system rewards output over understanding, students adapt accordingly. They reach for summaries, quick-reference formats, and highlight reels. They move faster, cover more ground, and absorb less of it.

The consequence is a generation of learners who can perform well in exams but struggle when the questions change shape. A foundation that was never properly built simply does not hold. The approximately 60 percent of employers in India who report a skills gap among graduates are, in a sense, describing the downstream cost of this bargain.

Where Depth Still Holds Ground

Not every subject has surrendered to shortcuts, and students know this better than most observers do.

Engineering entrance preparation, medical competitive exams, and any discipline where problems cannot be solved through pattern recognition alone still demand something different from the learner. In these spaces, students return to structured, sequential study. They practise repeatedly. They spend time on concepts, not just coverage, because the examinations themselves will not allow otherwise.

Instructive as that pattern is, it raises an uncomfortable question for educators and publishers alike. If the appetite for depth has not disappeared but merely gone dormant, surfacing only when the stakes are high enough and the examination demanding enough, how can it be brought back across every subject—not just those linked to high-stakes entrance tests?

The Volume Problem

One instinct, when learning outcomes fall short, is to add more: more content, more resources, more platforms. It is the wrong response.

Abundance without architecture creates noise. Students faced with too many resources do not study harder. They spend more time deciding what to study, and the cognitive overhead of navigating a crowded landscape becomes a barrier in itself. Fragmentation sets in. Consistency suffers.

The issue is rarely the quality of any single resource. It is the absence of a system that holds resources together—one that tells a student where to begin, how to progress, and when they are ready to move on. A platform that explains concepts well is not the same as a structured learning journey. The market has been excellent at building the former and has largely neglected the latter.

Why the Book Endures

Anyone who has spent a career in publishing will recognise that there is something worth pausing over here. The physical book, often dismissed as outdated, continues to solve a problem that digital formats have not fully managed to address.

A well-designed textbook is not just a container for content; it shapes how learning unfolds. Ideas are sequenced with intent, complexity builds gradually, and over time, a student develops a deeper relationship with the subject—not in a single sitting, but across weeks and months of returning to it. Books also take something away, and that absence matters. Reading without notifications or constant interruptions creates the kind of focus that deep learning depends on. That is not nostalgia; it is a practical reality.

Digital platforms, to their credit, have done something significant. They have expanded access, taking quality teaching into classrooms and homes that would otherwise have been left out. Access and structure, however, are different things, and it is structure that most students are still missing. The fact that the online K-12 edtech market in India, despite all its investment and ambition, captures only around 11 percent of total supplemental education spending tells its own story. Parents and students continue to vote, with their wallets, for formats that offer tangible and verifiable outcomes.

The Actual Question

The conversation around the future of education publishing tends to get stuck on format: print versus digital, video versus text, synchronous versus self-paced. These are not unimportant questions, but they are secondary.

The primary question is one of design—not the medium through which learning arrives, but whether the resource was built to produce learning in the first place. Resources designed for depth, sequenced for progression, and structured to carry a student from understanding to application are precisely what the market remains short of. Not content. Not access. Not technology.

Education will not improve by adding more into an already overcrowded space. It will improve when the people building learning tools ask a harder question: not how much students can access, but how well they can actually learn from it. Simple as that distinction sounds, it is the one most worth building around.

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