How College Dropout Alakh Pandey Became India's Most Popular Physics Teacher

As entrepreneurial landscape continues to expand across India with new start-ups popping up ever so frequently, success stories of those from Harvard or Columbia University, or the country’s premier colleges like IITs and IIMs have become rather commonplace.

Exception To The Rule: But amid the chatter, Alakh Pandey, the founder and CEO of Physics Wallah talked about his experience of setting up a successful company without any of these prestigious tags in a recent interview.

In the chat with author Neelesh Misra, Pandey talked about his humble upbringing and how hailing from a middle-class family shaped his risk-taking appetite to eventually set India’s leading and one of the most affordable ed-tech platforms.

Speaking about his childhood in Allahabad, Pandey reflected upon struggling through financial difficulties, which he says has made an impact in his journey with Physics Wallah.

Pandey said that keeping in mind his parents’ struggles to meet the financial needs for their children’s education, his company has taken ample steps to ease the monetary burden for his underprivileged students at the company.

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Early Beginnings: Pandey first realised his knack for teaching back when he began offering tuitions in the eight grade. “It is a different feeling of exhilaration altogether to teach someone,” he said in the interview.

This continued until he reached his tenth grade when he expanded this by offering students tuitions at their residences. By then teaching had become his passion, Pandey said, which laid the stepping stones for his now established company.

Pandey went into his days as a mechanical engineering student at Harcourt Butler Technical University (HBTI) without much of a plan. He said that while his first year was academically solid, he noticed that the culture in engineering colleges was to rote learn close to exams without truly understanding what they were studying.

“In a way, this was cheating,” he said. “If you study a day before (the exam) and go write the exam, what are you gaining? What are you getting out of this.”

Turning Point: He said that while he found friends and had many experiences in college, he didn’t get much out of it academically. He pointed out that this was generally the case for students outside the IIT and NIT system.

Eventually, he said he confessed to his elder sister that he no longer wanted to pursue his engineering degree, feeling he was not able to attend enough colleges, he was brushing shoulders with the wrong company and was getting progressively more depressed.

Pandey said his sister was incredibly supportive, even agreeing to bear the burden of paying back the education loan he had taken. He said he returned to his hometown soon after. He stressed that without his sister’s support, Physics Wallah would not exist.

In 2015, Pandey started Physics Wallah as a YouTube channel, which today boasts a massive 12.8 million subscriber count. The company now also has physical centres that offer coaching to students aiming to make it accessible to the mass.

Talking about the India’s education system Pandey called for the government’s intervention in the edtech sector and a more welfare approach to education. He called for the authorities to bridge the gap between the privileged and the underprivileged.

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