e-degrees may turn page for edutech

Bengaluru: India’s push to award online degrees at top 100 educational institutes, could boost business of educational technology startups including Eruditus, Coursera and upGrad.

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her budget speech, said that in order to provide quality education to students of deprived section of the society as well as those who do not have access to higher education, she proposes to start degree level full-fledged online education programmes.

The step, according to experts, is aimed at increasing India’s low gross enrolment ratio (GER) – a percentage of students in higher education of the total eligible population in the 18-23 age group. It stood at only 26.3% in 2018-19 in India, according to the latest government data. “It is a big announcement and has been a long time coming. To even reach China’s GER of 35%, we need to add at least 15 million new seats every year. That’s the size of opportunity for edtech companies with this policy move,” said Ashwin Damera, cofounder of Eruditus, an edtech company.


Eruditus, partners with top colleges in the US and Europe such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), London School of Economics, and others to create training courses targeted at professionals and executives.