The e-commerce giant last year launched a service called
, offering tutoring for high school exams and the tests that allow admission to India's elite engineering and technology universities.Amazon's exit, said the cutback was one of many across the company that also saw it shutter a food delivery service. Amazon may have done well to nix its service, because India values education enormously as means of economic and social advancement. Competition to secure places in good schools is therefore fierce: more than 150,000 candidates attempt the entry test for India's elite Institutes of Technology , but only around 10,000 are offered places. Even qualifying to sit the entry exams is not easy.
The prize of a place at one of India's top tertiary institutions is certainly worth it, because they are globally competitive. The likes of IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, Microsoft head Satay Nadella, Alphabet boss Sundar Pichai, VMWare CEO Raghu Raghuram and NetApp CEO George Kurian all graduated from IITs, and plenty of other tech execs also attended Indian unis.
India has therefore grown an enormous"edtech" market – online service providers that offer coaching, tests, and other services to help students improve their grades and maybe even do well enough to snag a place in an important institution.