"Proposal to use AI and Digital Public Infrastructure for free national coaching"
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)
shared, open, interoperable digital systems — identity, payments, data — built by the state for broad societal use.
APAAR ID
Academic Bank of Credits identifier linking a student's learning history to their official academic record.
India's school education system faces a deep structural inequality. Around 65 million students are enrolled in classes 9–12. Of these, roughly 27 million attend government schools, where access to quality subject-matter instruction is uneven. Private coaching has filled this gap. A National Statistical Office survey (2025) found that approximately 27% of students in classes 9–12 were taking private coaching, 30.7% in urban areas and 25.5% in rural areas. This translates to an estimated 17–20 million students participating in some form of test-preparation coaching.
The coaching industry is large and commercially significant. India's test-preparation market was estimated at $14.8 billion in FY26, projected to reach $23–26 billion by FY30 at a compound annual growth rate of 12–15%. Around 2,00,000 coaching centres operate nationwide. The market is dominated by a handful of large platforms and regional chains, but no single provider has the scale to serve the full student population. The largest online platform has roughly 4.9 million paid users, while the target population is many times larger.
This inequality in access to quality coaching is directly linked to outcomes in high-stakes examinations. The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET-UG) and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) are the two most widely taken competitive examinations in India. Performance in these exams determines access to medical and engineering education. Students from well-resourced families can afford intensive coaching; students from low-income or rural backgrounds often cannot. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 addresses elementary schooling but does not extend to secondary or competitive-examination preparation, leaving a significant policy gap.
The proposal is to use Artificial Intelligence and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) to deliver free, personalised coaching to every student preparing for NEET and JEE. The model draws explicitly on the architecture of UPI (Unified Payments Interface) and the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC). In both cases, the government built open, interoperable rails, a shared protocol layer, while private players competed to deliver services on top. The same logic is proposed for education: the state builds the infrastructure and sets standards; the private sector supplies content and mentoring.
The coaching industry currently bundles four distinct services: content delivery, doubt-solving and mentoring, peer group and discipline, and a credible quality signal (brand reputation). DPI can unbundle these. Content, video lectures, problem sets, mock tests, can be made freely available on an open catalogue. Doubt-solving can be delivered by AI tutors or by ranked teachers competing on an open platform. The quality signal can be replaced by a transparent, government-maintained rating and credentialing system. …
The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 remains inadequate in promoting incentive-based system for children's education without generating awareness about the importance of schooling. Analyse.
With the present state of development, Artificial Intelligence can effectively do which of the following?
1.Bring down electricity consumption in industrial units
2.Create meaningful short stories and songs
3.Disease diagnosis
4.Text-to-Speech Conversion
5.Wireless transmission of electrical energy
Select the correct answer using the code given below:
Which of the following statements with regard to Large Language Models (LLMs) used in machine learning is/are correct?
1.LLMs assign probabilities to the next possible word and then pick the one with the highest probability.
2.LLMs process data through mathematical optimization to minimise prediction errors.
3.LLMs produce unbiased outputs.
Select the answer using the code given below:
Consider the following pairs regarding India's Digital Public Infrastructure components and their proposed roles in an AI education platform:
1.Aadhaar/DigiLocker — Student identity verification and de-duplication
2.APAAR ID — Linking learning activity to the student's academic record
3.UPI — Governing the open content catalogue and accreditation standards
4.DEPA/Account Aggregator — Consent-based student data portability
How many of the above pairs are correctly matched?
According to the National Statistical Office survey of 2025, what was the approximate proportion of students in classes 9–12 taking private coaching in India, and how did urban and rural rates compare?
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