Skip to content
Subscriber Only

Zuckerberg or Gates? Billionaires Try Opposite Paths for Online Education in India

Facebook's founder is backing a for-profit startup called BYJU'S that aims to bring a Disneyesque approach to learning.

Rushi Parmar lives in Keshod, a Western Indian town so small it has one park, a single-screen movie hall and no shopping mall. For clever kids like Parmar, who is 12 and heading into seventh grade, the only option for a decent education used to be traveling to a bigger city at least three-and-a-half hours away. That wasn't happening, so Parmar downloaded an app from the online education company BYJU'S and started learning math and science at her own pace. A year later, she just topped her class in sixth-grade exams. 

“I like to impress my teachers with my knowledge of advanced chapters like monocots and dicots in the biology class and thermal equilibrium in the physics class,” Parmar brags. “My teachers love it.” Impressed with her performance, several of her school friends have enrolled with BYJU’S for the seventh grade.