Teaching India and the business of coaching
With Khan Sir · Hosted by Raj Shamani
Episode summary
Patna-based educator Khan Sir joins Raj Shamani on Figuring Out for one of the most requested conversations on the show. They cover how a small classroom in Bihar became one of India's largest independent coaching brands, why he refuses to raise fees despite crushing demand, the reality of India's UPSC and SSC ecosystem, and what he thinks is broken about how India teaches its kids. Khan Sir also shares the personal story behind his teaching style, why he almost quit twice, and how he thinks about YouTube as a distribution channel for education rather than entertainment.
Key takeaways
- 1.India's coaching industry is a symptom, not a cause — the real problem is that formal schooling stopped preparing students for the exams that decide their future.
- 2.Free or near-free content on YouTube is the single biggest equalizer in Indian education in the last twenty years.
- 3.Scale in teaching breaks the moment you optimize for revenue instead of student outcomes — the two are not the same.
- 4.Most coaching centres are selling hope, not learning; the difference shows up in results by year three.
- 5.The best teachers are people who stayed close to their own confusion — they remember what it felt like to not understand.
Full transcript
Transcript edited lightly for readability. Timestamps refer to the YouTube video above.
Khan Sir, thank you for finally doing this. Let's start at the beginning — why teaching, and why Patna?
Because Patna needed it and no one else was doing it well. There are lakhs of students in Bihar preparing for competitive exams with almost no access to quality teaching. I didn't set out to build a brand. I set out to teach the next batch. And then the next. Everything else followed.
You've had chances to raise your fees dramatically. Why haven't you?
Because the day I raise fees, I lose the student I actually want to teach. The kid from a village whose parents saved for two years to send him to Patna — he's the reason this exists. If I price him out, the whole thing is meaningless. There are enough people already selling education to the rich.
What's broken about how India teaches its kids?
Schools have stopped teaching thinking. They teach chapters. A student who can memorize a chapter cannot answer a question that's phrased slightly differently in an exam. That's why coaching exists — we're doing the job the schools abandoned. It shouldn't be this way, but it is.
How do you think about YouTube?
YouTube is my classroom now. A student in a village in Assam can sit in the same class as a student in Delhi. That is the single most important thing that has happened to Indian education in my lifetime. I don't think of it as content. I think of it as a school that never closes.
Final question — what's your advice to a young teacher starting out today?
Stay close to the students who don't understand. The moment you only enjoy teaching the toppers, you've stopped being a teacher. The real job is with the child in the back row.