Meera Kulkarni
Solapur, MaharashtraFinished the electronics track on a shared phone, one module a night. She now maintains the diagnostic equipment at the district hospital and teaches the same track to her cohort.
Knowledge was never meant to be sold.
Takshalya Foundation runs free, open courses taught by verified educators — and pays those educators properly. No fees for learners. No unpaid teaching. Both halves, or the argument does not hold.
Learners48,120
Enrolled across all open courses since 2019.
Volunteers1,284
Community mentors, translators and moderators.
Free courses340
Published and permanently free. No tiering.
Villages reached612
Offline-first delivery in low-connectivity districts.
Certificates issued22,940
Verified completions, issued at no cost.
Paid to educators₹4.2Cr
Direct compensation. Never equity, never exposure.
A foundation, not a marketplace.
Takshalya Foundation was set up on a plain observation: the people who teach are the people who earn least from teaching. Every platform that promised to fix that eventually charged the learner. We took the other route — fund the educator, keep the classroom free, and publish what we spend.
Named for a school that charged nothing.
Takshashila taught for centuries without tuition. Students arrived, studied under a teacher who was kept by the community, and left. We are not claiming its lineage — we are borrowing its arrangement, which worked for far longer than ours has.
Mission
Keep learning free at the point of use, and make teaching a livelihood rather than a donation of someone's evenings.
Vision
A generation that learns without debt, taught by educators who were never asked to work for exposure.
01
Free at the point of use
No fee, no trial, no locked module. If a learner has to reach for a card, we have failed the premise.
02
Teachers are paid
Every hour taught is an hour compensated. Volunteering is welcome; unpaid labour dressed as opportunity is not.
03
The books stay open
What comes in, what goes out, what it bought. Published quarterly, including the quarters that look bad.
04
No theatre
No streaks, no badges, no countdowns. Those exist to hold attention, not to teach — we would rather earn the hour honestly.
Dr. Ananya RaoFounder & Trustee, Takshalya Foundation
“I was asked to teach for exposure for eleven years. Exposure does not pay rent, and it never taught anyone anything either.”
I taught physics in a district college for eleven years. In that time I watched capable students leave — not because the work was beyond them, but because the fee was. I also watched colleagues leave, for the opposite reason: teaching paid too little to stay.
Both of those are the same problem seen from two ends. A platform that solves only the first ends up asking teachers to donate their labour. A platform that solves only the second ends up charging the student. The arrangement has to hold both, or it collapses into the thing it replaced.
Discover your next skill.
Every track is open and free, taught by someone paid to teach it well — foundational to advanced, with nothing locked behind a second half.
Data literacySpoken EnglishThe web from first principlesFarm economicsCommunity healthDesign & restraintOffline-first deliveryTranslation
Analysis · Foundational
24 lessonsData literacy for everyone
Read a chart, question a number, build a small dataset by hand.
Language · Foundational
40 lessonsSpoken English, without the shame
Taught by people who learned it late themselves. No accent tax.
Engineering · Intermediate
52 lessonsThe web from first principles
HTML to a deployed app, one honest layer at a time.
Livelihoods · Intermediate
18 lessonsThe economics of a small farm
Costing, credit and markets — for the people already doing it.
Design · Advanced
30 lessonsDesigning for people who mistrust design
Restraint as a craft. What to leave out and why.
Public health · Foundational
22 lessonsCommunity health work in the field
Triage, records and trust in low-resource settings.
Start learning today.
Every course is open, free and taught by someone who is paid to teach it well. No trial, no card, no locked second half.
Fresh ideas & insights.
Field notes, arguments and the occasional look at our own ledger — written by the people doing the work.
Argument18 Jun 2026 · 9 min
The quiet economics of the education paywall
Who actually pays when learning is “free with an upsell”, and why the bill always lands on the person with the least.
Read the pieceField notes30 May 2026 · 7 min
What changes when you pay the teacher first
A year of paying educators before a single learner enrolled, and what it did to the material.
Craft2 May 2026 · 6 min
Designing a course for a shared phone
Offline-first is not a feature flag. It is a different idea of what a lesson is.
Ledger11 Apr 2026 · 5 min
Publishing the quarters that look bad
Open books only mean something if you leave the bad rows in. Here are ours.
An ecosystem, not an exit.
Learners here don’t stay learners. These started as coursework and became things people use — built by graduates, backed by the foundation, owned by their founders.
Anaaj
Agri-markets · PilotingA price ledger farmers can read on a feature phone, built by two of our own graduates.
Sunaai
Accessibility · IncubatingScreen-reader-first course tooling. Started as a class project; now its own thing.
Karya Collective
Livelihoods · ScalingA fair-pay marketplace for the skills learned here. The loop, closing.
Build something extraordinary.
Learners here don't stay learners. Bring an idea to the innovation programme and we'll help you make it real — mentors, a small grant, and a room that has seen it before.
Ideas becoming reality.
Not prototypes for a demo day — things running in the field, built by people who learned the skill here and then used it.
Field trialShippedIn progress
A village water-quality logbook
Public health — Built by a health-worker cohort. Running in eleven districts.
Low-cost Braille primers, printed on demand
Accessibility — Open files, any print shop. Over four thousand copies out.
A costing tool for handloom weavers
Livelihoods — Turns twenty years of instinct into a number a bank will read.
Where this has gone, and where it is going.
Six years in, with the part that matters still ahead: an endowment large enough that the free classroom stops depending on next year's fundraising.
- 2019
The foundation is registered
Three educators, one room in Pune, and a rule written into the trust deed: the learner never pays.
- 2020
First twelve courses go live
Recorded on borrowed equipment during the lockdown. Every educator was paid, which meant the founders were not.
- 2022
Knowledge partners open up
Educators publish on their own terms and are paid per hour taught. The model stops depending on goodwill.
- 2024
Offline-first delivery
Courses sync to low-end devices and run without a connection — the districts that need this most have the least bandwidth.
- 2026
Mentorship & innovation
In progressLearners bring problems from their own districts; mentors and builders help ship the answer. In progress now.
- 2028
A self-funding endowment
PlannedThe end state: educator pay funded in perpetuity, so the free classroom never depends on next year's fundraising.
Learn from people who’ve done it.
Mentorship pairs you with practitioners, not personalities — paid for their time, chosen for their patience.
Arundhati RaoData & research · Bengaluru
Twenty years turning field data into decisions people trust.
Imran QureshiSoftware craft · Hyderabad
Ships production systems; teaches the parts the tutorials skip.
Kavya NairDesign & communication · Kochi
Believes clarity is a kindness. Mentors on making the case plainly.
Devendra SinghLivelihoods & finance · Jaipur
Helps builders cost a thing honestly before they fall for it.
Careers with the foundation.
Build the loop from the inside. Every role is paid at or above the going rate — including the teaching fellowships.
What’s happening.
Open houses where we walk the ledger, build days with real deadlines, and forums for the educators who make this work.
09AUG
Open house: how the money moves
Online · Live, recorded afterWe walk the ledger, line by line, and answer anything.
23AUG
Build day, Ranchi cohort
In person · RanchiA room, a deadline, and mentors who won't let you overbuild.
06SEPT
Knowledge partners forum
Hybrid · Pune + onlineFor educators: rates, rights and what we owe you.
What the arrangement has produced.
The arrangement only means anything if it can be checked, so these are reported as they stand — including the parts that look bad. Nothing here is rounded up.
Learners48,120Enrolled across all open courses since 2019.
Volunteers1,284Community mentors, translators and moderators.
Free courses340Published and permanently free. No tiering.
Villages reached612Offline-first delivery in low-connectivity districts.
Certificates issued22,940Verified completions, issued at no cost.
Paid to educators₹4.2CrDirect compensation. Never equity, never exposure.
Provisional figures. These are internal counts and have not been independently audited. They are published here because the arrangement should be checkable, and they will be replaced by audited numbers rather than quietly corrected.
Irfan Sheikh
Murshidabad, West BengalCame in for the maths refresher, stayed to translate it. Forty-one modules in Bengali, and the Bengali cohort is now the second largest on the platform.
Lakshmi Devi
Warangal, TelanganaTaught weaving economics as a volunteer, then as a paid educator once the course found its audience. Her cooperative's bookkeeping course is the most completed course we host.
“I did the whole track on a phone I share with my brother, one module a night after the shop closed. Nobody asked me for a rupee, and nobody made me feel like a charity case either.”
Meera KulkarniLearner, Solapur
Rooms where this actually happens.
Workshops, recording days, translation sprints and the occasional rollout that needed a generator.
2024
2024
20234:12
2025
20252:38
2025
2025
2024
20236:04
2024
2025
2019
20203:21
2025
Who stands behind the arrangement.
Grant-makers, delivery partners and curriculum collaborators. Named plainly — where the money and the material come from is not a secret here.
Sarada Trust
Meghdoot Foundation
District Skills Mission
Kaveri Institute
OpenLearn Commons
Grameen Connect
Become part of something bigger.
Learn freely. Build boldly. Give back. Every part of the loop is open — pick where you come in.