KarmSakha
Ramesh Patel's hands still carry the calluses from fifteen years of polishing diamonds in Surat's Varachha area. His monthly salary? Roughly â¹18,000. When his daughter Priya cleared her 12th boards and announced she wanted to prepare for bank exams, Ramesh did what any father would do-he visited the nearest coaching centre. The fee chart made his heart sink: â¹45,000 for a one-year programme. That's two and a half months of his salary, gone before a single lesson begins.
"I came home that evening and couldn't look her in the eye," Ramesh recalls, his voice catching slightly. "She saw the pamphlet in my pocket and understood. She said, 'Papa, it's okay. I'll figure something out.' That night, I couldn't sleep."
What Priya figured out was KarmSakha.com-a Surat-based education platform that's quietly turning the â¹40,000 crore coaching industry on its head. Her entire preparation cost? Forty-nine rupees. Not forty-nine thousand. Just forty-nine. The price of two cups of chai at the local tapri.
Walk through the coaching hub areas of any Indian city-Mukherjee Nagar in Delhi, Boring Road in Patna, or even Surat's own Ring Road-and you'll see the same scene. Thousands of young faces, clutching heavy bags, shuttling between cramped classrooms and cramped PG accommodations. Many have taken loans. Some have sold family jewellery. A few have mortgaged agricultural land. The unspoken truth of India's government job dream is that it often begins with debt.
So when a platform claims to offer complete exam preparation-SSC, Banking, Railways, UPSC-for less than a plate of pav bhaji, the natural reaction is suspicion. Where's the catch? Is the content garbage? Is it a data-harvesting scam?
I asked the same questions when I first heard about KarmSakha. Then I downloaded their materials from KarmSakha.com/ebooks and showed them to a retired bank manager who coaches students part-time. His verdict, after flipping through the quantitative aptitude section: "This is genuinely good. I've seen â¹500 books with worse content."
To understand KarmSakha, you need to understand Surat. This isn't Bangalore, where startups chase billion-dollar valuations and burn investor money on Super Bowl ads. This is a city where a diamond merchant's handshake is worth more than a legal contract. Where textile traders have built empires on thin margins and insane volumes. Where the question isn't "how do we look impressive?" but "how do we serve more customers?"
"We didn't take any VC funding," a company spokesperson tells me over a phone call, the sounds of Surat traffic honking in the background. "Everyone in Bangalore thought we were crazy. But we looked at the numbers. If we charge â¹49 and get ten lakh students, that's â¹4.9 crore. If we charge â¹5,000 and get only 5,000 students, that's â¹2.5 crore-and we've excluded 99% of the people who actually need us. The math was obvious. The courage was in trusting it."
Let me break down what students actually receive. The core package includes three comprehensive ebooks: quantitative aptitude (the maths that haunts every aspirant's dreams), logical reasoning, and general awareness. These aren't thin pamphlets-we're talking 200+ pages each, with solved examples, practice problems, and previous year questions.
Beyond that, the platform offers AI-generated practice tests that adapt to your weak areas (struggle with percentage problems? The algorithm notices and serves you more). There's a daily current affairs module-crucial for anyone serious about government exams-and something called "Flash Summaries" that helps you retain information using techniques borrowed from cognitive science.
Here's the detail that stopped me in my tracks: KarmSakha offers content in ten Indian languages. Not just Hindi and English-but Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, and Punjabi. For context, most premium EdTech platforms treat anything beyond English as an afterthought.
I spoke with Meera, a 24-year-old from Bhavnagar preparing for GPSC exams. She studied in Gujarati medium until Class 12. "Every coaching material I found was in English or Hindi," she says. "I would spend half my time just understanding the language, forget learning the concepts. When I found KarmSakha's Gujarati materials, I actually cried. Finally, I could focus on what matters."
I posed this question to a coaching centre owner in Mumbai who requested anonymity. His response was telling: "Look, if someone is disciplined enough to self-study using their materials, they'll do well. Our value is in the classroom environment, the peer pressure, the teachers who yell at you when you slack off. Not everyone has that self-discipline."
Fair point. KarmSakha isn't claiming to replace the human element of coaching. What they're saying is simpler: for those who can't afford â¹50,000, why should the alternative be nothing?
Remember Priya, the diamond polisher's daughter? I caught up with her father recently. She cleared her IBPS Clerk exam in her second attempt and now works at a nationalised bank in Surat. Her starting salary is more than double what Ramesh earns.
"That â¹49," Ramesh says, shaking his head with a smile I can hear through the phone, "was the best investment of my life. Not because of the returns. Because my daughter looked me in the eye again and said, 'Papa, we figured it out together.'"
In Surat, they've been cutting diamonds for generations. Now, it seems, they're also cutting through the barriers that keep dreams locked away from those who need them most.
