Edtech firm Byju's plans to expand its free education programme

Edtech firm Byju's on Thursday said it will expand its free education programme to cover 1 crore students in rural and remote areas of the country by 2025.

The company had earlier set a target to cover 50 lakh students by 2025 out of which it has already reached out to 34 lakh students, Byju's co-founder Divya Gokulnath told PTI.

"Education for All was launched about 15 months back, but most of the students were onboarded in the last 12 months. When we started, we kept a target of 5 million students by 2025. The response has been phenomenal, and we revised the target to 10 million by 2025," she said.

Byju's has partnered with 128 NGOs to provide free education to millions of underserved children across India.

The company provides its app on a device to students through which they are continuing their education.

"In a way, we attempt to bring the school to the child when vice versa cannot happen. For most of these children, learning app is their primary mode of learning," Gokulnath said.

She said that the programme has reached to a mix of students who either stopped going to school, never went to school and first-generation learners of their families.

"We also launched the app in 11 regional languages so far, to ensure that students across the country can learn from us in a language that they are comfortable with. We are positive because of this that we will be able to educate at least 10 million children by 2025. Our aspiration is that we educate one new student through 'Education for All' for every new paid student that we onboard onto our platform," Gokulnath said.

The edtech firm has tied up with Niti Aayog for the aspirational districts to create a pool of 3,000 bright children that do not have access to any exam prep specifically for NEET and JEE coaching.

"The idea was to support these students for the next two years, so they get into one of those engineering or medical courses. Additionally, we are the only organization that is present in some of these Himalayan border states. This is one area where the students need both JEE coaching 12th-grade basic school," Gokulnath said.