Online or offline, finding teachers for school kids is the Indian education sector’s kryptonite

For the past two years, ed-tech startups in India have been tirelessly working to keep school kids up to date with their school curriculum. With students now slowly trickling back to physical classrooms, the scope of both offline and online classes is growing. One gaping hole, though, gets in the way: teachers.

Over the decades, India has opened plenty of schools but hasn’t recruited enough teachers: The country has around 120,000 single-teacher schools, of which nearly nine in 10 are in rural areas, according to a 2021 Unesco report. Needless to say, these schools give the idea of quality mostly a miss.

The Unesco report shows India requiring a whopping 1.2 million more teachers to meet the shortfall.

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