“EDTECH MONOPOLIES AND PEDAGOGICAL COMMODIFICATION: REGULATORY CHALLENGES OF PRIVATE TUTORING PLATFORMS IN INDIA COMPARED TO WESTERN REGULATORY FRAMEWORKS”

Abstract

The rapid platformization of private supplementary tutoring in India has concentrated market power among a handful of venture-backed entities, converting pedagogical processes into scalable, data-extractive commodities while formal schooling remains under-resourced. Drawing on Bray’s comparative analyses of shadow education and recent scholarship on platform capitalism in education, this study interrogates how the absence of sector-specific legislation—relying instead on fragmented consumer-protection notices, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, and state-level coaching guidelines—permits predatory pricing, opaque algorithmic personalization, and the redefinition of learning as a private good. Western counterparts, by contrast, embed stronger guardrails: the United States’ FERPA and COPPA frameworks impose institutional control over student records and parental consent for minors, while the European GDPR and emerging AI Act classifications treat adaptive tutoring systems as high-risk processing requiring data-protection impact assessments and purpose limitation.

Through a multi-method comparative design—critical policy discourse analysis of Indian guidelines and NEP 2020 alongside doctrinal examination of U.S. and EU instruments, supplemented by secondary quantitative indicators of market concentration and enrolment disparities—the inquiry maps institutional voids that enable monopoly formation and equity erosion1. Results demonstrate that India’s laissez-faire posture accelerates pedagogical standardization and socioeconomic stratification, whereas Western regimes, despite their own limitations, better constrain secondary commercial uses of learner data and preserve residual public oversight2. These asymmetries underscore the necessity of hybrid regulatory architectures that combine competition remedies, child-specific data protections, and pedagogical quality standards to re-embed private tutoring within a public-interest educational ecology rather than allowing it to operate as an unaccountable parallel system3.