India’s ‘toxic’ ed-tech giant

How Byju’s hard-sells desperate parents into taking out predatory loans for their kids’ education.

Byju’s is a titan of the Indian ed-tech market, and its flagship program, The Learning App, has 40m users and 2.8m paid subscribers; its valuation is about to climb to $21b; it’s been on a spending spree, buying up competitors in Asia and the USA.

But as Akanksha Singh writes for Rest of World, the company’s sales culture is rotten from top to bottom, with sales staff hustling poor parents to take out predatory loans so that they can hit their sales targets.

https://restofworld.org/2021/inside-india-edtech-byjus/

The article quotes an anonymous former sales person who says he sold a Learning App subscription to a driver with only $9 to his name, whose fees were directly deducted from his paycheck and whose wife pledged to work 24/7 to make up the difference.

And it quotes ed-tech activist Pradeep Poonia — a former ed-tech worker — who describes a host of deceptive tactics rooted in the fact that “Edtech is trying to solve problems that don’t exist.”

He describes a sales pitch that plays on poor parents’ insecurity about their children’s future, that gets them to buy into expensive gadgets and programs…