How Indian tutors are making millions off NEET, JEE aspirants' anxiety

The Indian test-prep market has always been about turning anxiety into cash. More than 1.5 million hopefuls scramble for a little over 100,000 medical and dentistry placements nationwide

Sixteen-year-olds going crazy over their favorite Bollywood actor is one thing, but teenagers behaving hysterically on seeing a science tutor on stage? That’s the kind of superstardom that Alakh Pandey, the 30-year-old co-founder of Physics Wallah, has built up in India’s small cities and villages, starting eight years ago with nothing more than a white board and a YouTube channel, which has since been viewed 1.4 billion times.
 

With more than 5 million downloads on Google Play Store, Pandey’s low-cost tutoring app — now known as PW — became a unicorn last month with a $1.1 billion valuation. It raised