Takshashila Education

About Takshashila Education

Takshashila Schools is a young and innovative organization working to establish a new model of affordable education in India by building a model affordable school in the National Capital Region (NCR). We are building a higher quality affordable school which will be both sustainable and replicable.

Despite improvements in recent years, India’s public school system still faces significant challenges, and many families do not have a quality public school to which they can send their children. As a result, millions of families, across all income levels, seek to place their children in private schools, from a very young age. However, the better schools are well out of reach of most Indian families, even with tuition costs around $100/month. As a result, tens of thousands of small, often informal, private schools now exist, often providing a better education than can be obtained in the local public school, for as little as $2-10/month, but usually with very basic infrastructure. Very little exists in the middle of these two categories, especially on the lower end, despite a widespread recognition that education, especially English-medium, is critical for today’s youth.

Creating a system of quality, affordable schools in India is not an easy task for numerous reasons, and especially given capital constraints. India requires all private schools to be run by not-for-profit societies and trusts. While the goal is a laudable one, in that schools should not be run for profit alone, one result is that there are not nearly enough schools to meet demand. While Indians donate a significant amount of money to charitable schools across the country, these schools, usually providing very good alternatives to the public schools, are in short supply, especially given the size of India’s youth population.

Many have recognized the extreme need for more options for families in the middle and bottom of the pyramid in India, and are exploring ways that are both feasible and acceptable to bring more investment capital into this sector. Takshashila’s goal would be to create a chain of quality, affordable schools to help meet demand.

Takshashila currently has its first school running over 600 children between pre-school and 10th grade (expanding by one grade every year) based in Uttar Pradesh, in the National Capital Region (NCR), about 1 ½ hours from New Delhi by car. The children come from Hindi speaking families and most are only 1^st or 2^nd generation learners. Their families pay between $10-20/month to provide them with an opportunity to learn English and attend a school focused on providing them with a higher quality education than exists elsewhere in the area.

Takshashila is founded by two partners, one Indian and one American, who left the corporate world to prove a new model for delivery affordable private education to Indian youth.