Education Shouldn't Be a Treasure Hunt
Two days ago, I was working on the Bihar Eklavya app.
My task was simple: help students find their textbooks.
I thought this would be easy.
It wasn't.
I started looking for Bihar textbooks online and quickly found myself jumping between different pages, portals, book lists, filters, PDFs and links.
The books were there.
But finding the right book, for the right class, for the right subject, in a way that felt obvious to a student, was surprisingly difficult.
And that made me think.
We talk a lot about access to education.
We talk about digital classrooms, AI tutors, smart learning, online content and digital India.
But sometimes, access is much simpler than that.
Can a student find their textbook without struggling?
The irony is that the student is expected to navigate an increasingly complicated digital world just to reach the very first thing they need to study.
And maybe this reflects something bigger about our education system.
We have built a system around classes, subjects, chapters, examinations and marks.
But somewhere along the way, we forgot to ask:
How does a student actually experience all of this?
A government portal can have thousands of resources and still feel inaccessible.
A textbook can be freely available and still be difficult to discover.
And a curriculum can be designed for students without necessarily being designed around students.
India's education policies have spoken about flexibility, experiential learning and moving beyond rote learning.
But sometimes, before we completely redesign how a student learns, perhaps we should solve something more basic.
Make learning easier to reach.
Because education shouldn't be a treasure hunt.
A student shouldn't need to know which portal hosts the book, which category it belongs to, or which obscure link leads to the PDF.
They should simply be able to say:
"I am in Class 8. I need my Science textbook."
And get it.
Maybe good educational technology isn't always about adding more intelligence.
Sometimes, it's about removing the unnecessary struggle between a student and the thing they came to learn.
The best education system isn't necessarily the one with the most content.
It's the one where a student can actually find their way to it.