Dear India, Your Kids Deserve Books. Not Debt.

TL;DR

Indian families spend 20 to 30 per cent of their annual household income on education – fees, books, transport, coaching, and the costs no one puts on the brochure.

Education cost inflation runs at 10 to 12 per cent annually in India. Salaries do not.

The gap between what the state funds and what families absorb is not accidental. It is structural. And it falls hardest on the families least equipped to carry it.

A child’s access to books – the most foundational input in their education – should not depend on what their family can afford in April.

This is not a problem without a solution. The solution exists. It requires a system that treats books as shared infrastructure rather than annual consumer goods.

This is BookMandee’s argument, stated plainly: no child in India should be deprived of access to education because their family could not afford a textbook. We are not willing to accept that as permanent.

Dear India,

We need to talk about something you already know but have collectively decided not to say too loudly.

Every April, tens of millions of your children go back to school. And every April, tens of millions of their parents quietly absorb a financial hit that does not appear in any government statistic, does not generate any policy response, and does not make any headline – because it is too ordinary, too widely shared, too deeply accepted as simply the way things are, to register as a crisis.

The booklist arrives. The arithmetic begins. The sacrifice is made.

A month’s savings, gone. An advance taken from an employer. A relative called. A different purchase delayed. All of it so that a child can walk into a classroom with the right books in their bag – not because those books needed to be new, not because last year’s version was educationally insufficient, not because any pedagogical necessity demanded that the family spend what it spent – but because the system was never designed to give them a better option.

This letter is about that system. About what it costs. About who pays. And about why the answer – which is not complicated, which does not require a new government programme or a constitutional amendment or a decade-long policy cycle – has taken this long to arrive.

The Silence Around the Cost

India talks about education constantly. It is in every election manifesto, every budget speech, every aspirational narrative about a rising middle class lifting itself through knowledge and hard work. Education is the great equaliser. Education is the ladder. Education is the investment no one regrets.

What India talks about considerably less is the price of that ladder, rung by rung, paid in cash by families who were never told that the investment would come with an annual invoice they could not negotiate.

The Comprehensive Modular Survey on Education 2025 – conducted across 52,085 households – found that families in private schools spend an average of ₹25,002 per student annually. Nearly ten times what government school families spend. In Delhi, Haryana, and Punjab, the average crosses ₹40,000. And a separate industry analysis found that parents are spending 20 to 30 per cent of their annual household income on their children’s education – not just fees, but books, transport, coaching, stationery, uniforms, and the dozen quiet costs that arrive throughout the year without announcement.
Twenty to thirty per cent of annual household income. On education. For a country where the median urban household income sits at approximately ₹2 to ₹3 lakh per year, that is ₹40,000 to ₹90,000 annually – an amount that shapes every other financial decision the family makes. The holiday they do not take. The appliance they do not replace. The savings account that does not grow as fast as it should.

And the books are part of this. Not all of it – fees, coaching, and transport are larger line items. But books are the part that hits in a single month, all at once, with no instalment option and no mechanism for relief. The booklist arrives in April or May, and by the time school reopens, the money needs to have moved.

What We Have Chosen to Normalise

There is a version of this conversation that treats the financial burden of school books as unfortunate but inevitable – a function of printing costs, distribution margins, and the general expense of producing educational materials at scale. That version is incomplete.

The cost of school books in India is not simply a market outcome. It is, in significant part, a design outcome. A set of structural choices – made by publishers, permitted by schools, and unaddressed by policy – that keeps the cost of books high and the second-hand market artificially weak.

Annual edition updates that render last year’s perfectly functional book technically obsolete. Publisher-school arrangements that may eliminate price competition. An education cost inflation rate of 10 to 12 per cent annually – more than double the general inflation rate in most years – running consistently ahead of household income growth for over a decade.

India’s total education expenditure stood at only 4.12 per cent of GDP in 2021-22. The National Education Policy 2020 set a target of 6 per cent. The parliamentary standing committee on education flagged this shortfall as recently as 2025. The gap between what the state funds and what families are expected to absorb – quietly, individually, without complaint – is not incidental. It is the structural consequence of a system that has decided, by omission if not by design, that the cost of a child’s books is a private problem rather than a public one.

It is not a private problem. It is a public failure wearing a private face.

The Children This System Is Failing

Let us be specific about who pays the most.

Not the family in South Delhi with two incomes and a household budget that can absorb ₹25,000 in April without fundamentally disrupting anything. They pay. They feel it. They mention it over dinner and move on. The system is uncomfortable for them. It is not destroying them.

The system is destroying – or at minimum, seriously constraining – the families for whom ₹10,000 in April is not an inconvenience but a crisis. The delivery supervisor in Nagpur whose two children’s combined booklist costs more than his monthly advance can cover. The first-generation school family in rural Maharashtra for whom the annual book cost is the price of selling a small quantity of stored grain. The single mother in Bhopal whose daughter’s NEET preparation books represent a financial calculation that has to be made against rent, electricity, and food.

These are not exceptional cases. They are representative of a very large proportion of the families sending children to private schools in India’s Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities – the families who have chosen aspiration over comfort, who have decided that a mid-range private school is worth the stretch, who are paying for that decision in ways that no brochure mentioned when they signed the admission form.

And behind them: the even larger population of aspirants – the UPSC candidates in small towns, the NEET hopefuls in villages, the JEE aspirants whose families have made one enormous bet on one child’s preparation – for whom the book cost is not incidental to their dream but directly implicated in whether it is achievable at all.

The child who cannot afford the right books is not failing the system. The system is failing the child. And we have, for too long, allowed the failure to be misread as the child’s problem.

What Other Countries Decided

India did not inherit this problem. It chose it – or rather, it chose not to solve it, which amounts to the same thing.

Germany decided that school textbooks belong to the school, not the student. Children borrow them. Families pay a small annual fee – typically between €20 and €50 – rather than purchasing full sets. The books are maintained, reused across academic years, and replaced only when genuinely worn out.
Finland decided that all learning materials are part of the educational infrastructure and provided free of charge. A Finnish child does not arrive at school in September wondering whether their family managed to buy the right books.
Bangladesh – with a fraction of India’s per capita income – built a national textbook distribution programme that delivers over 350 million free books annually to primary and secondary students. The logistics are imperfect. The principle is not: a textbook is the state’s responsibility, not the family’s.
The United Kingdom loans textbooks through schools at the secondary level. The university second-hand book market is well-established, well-organised, and treated as the default rather than the fallback.

These countries did not solve this problem because they are wealthier or more organised or more idealistic. They solved it because they made a decision – at the level of policy, or culture, or both – that a child’s access to the books they need to learn is not something that should vary with their family’s ability to pay in any given April.

India has not made that decision. Not fully. Not yet.

The NCERT subsidy reaches government school students. The 90 million children in private schools, and the millions of competitive exam aspirants beyond them, are left to absorb the cost on their own.

The Argument We Are Making

BookMandee is a marketplace. It connects families who have finished with books to families who need them. It is, in its operational description, a fairly straightforward thing.

But the marketplace rests on an argument. And we want to state that argument plainly, because we think it deserves to be said without qualification.

A child’s access to education should not depend on what their family can afford.

Not in a country that spends more on education in absolute terms than almost any other on earth. Not in a country whose cultural investment in education – as a vehicle for mobility, for dignity, for the future – is among the deepest in the world. Not in a country that has produced, from circumstances of genuine scarcity, scientists and officers and entrepreneurs and artists and public servants of extraordinary calibre.

Not when the books that child needs already exist, in perfectly good condition, in a household twenty minutes away.

The scarcity is not in the books. The scarcity is in the infrastructure that connects them to the children who need them. And infrastructure – unlike talent, unlike aspiration, unlike the will to learn – is entirely within our power to build.

What ‘Debt’ Actually Looks Like

The word in this letter’s title is chosen deliberately. Debt.

Not in every case a formal loan. Often something quieter and more corrosive: the advance from an employer that sits as an informal obligation through April and May. The amount borrowed from a relative that will be repaid in kind at some future moment of need. The savings account drawn down in April and rebuilt slowly through the rest of the year.

For the families in the middle – not wealthy enough to be unbothered, not poor enough to qualify for government subsidies – this informal debt is the texture of educational aspiration in India. They are not in a financial crisis. They are in permanent, low-grade financial strain, with April as its annual peak.

And for families at the lower end of the private school economy – the ones who chose an English medium school because it represented something important, because they had decided that their children would have opportunities they did not – the strain is not low-grade. It is structural. It shapes decisions. It delays other investments. It accumulates across twelve years of schooling into an amount that, if totalled, would be startling.

A family spending ₹10,000 annually on books across two children over twelve years of school has spent ₹1.2 lakh on books alone. Much of that money went towards replacing books that already existed in perfectly good condition in someone else’s home. Much of it was, in the most precise sense, avoidable.

The books existed. The infrastructure to reach them did not.

The Other Side of This Argument

We want to be fair about what BookMandee can and cannot do.

A well-functioning second-hand book marketplace reduces the cost of books. It does not reduce school fees, which are the larger line item for most families. It does not address the coaching cost, which for competitive exam aspirants can dwarf the book cost entirely. It does not solve the structural underinvestment in public education that has made private schooling – and its attendant costs – feel like the only viable option for aspiring families.

These are real limitations. We are not making a claim larger than the one we can support.

What we are claiming is this:

Within the specific cost that books represent – which is real, which is annual, which is compressible without any reduction in educational quality – there is a functioning solution available today. Not in five years, pending policy change. Not after a government scheme is designed and funded and implemented. Today.

A parent who sources their child’s Class 9 books second-hand saves ₹3,000 to ₹6,000. Over a school career, across two children, that saving is material. It does not solve the entire problem. But it solves a defined, real part of it.

The rest of the problem requires policy, advocacy, and a longer arc of change. That work is worth doing, and we support it. But while it is being done, the books that families need this April should not cost more than they have to.

What We Are Asking

Not much. Less than it might seem.

If you are a parent with books your child has finished with, list them on BookMandee. Do not send them to the raddi. The ₹400 you will recover from the raddi is not the measure of what those books are worth. To another family, in another part of your city, those books are worth thousands of rupees – and more than money, they are the difference between a complete preparation and a compromised one.

If you are a parent sourcing books for the next academic year: try the second-hand option first. Not as a fallback. As the starting point. For NCERT-aligned school books, for competitive exam preparation, for the reference books whose content has not changed in three years – second-hand is not a compromise. It is the smarter choice.

If you are a teacher, an educator, a school administrator: think about what your school’s book policy signals. A school that actively discourages second-hand books – without a clear academic reason – is a school that has chosen its own interests over families’. That is worth naming.

If you are a policymaker, or close to one – the question of household textbook expenditure deserves serious policy attention. The countries that have addressed it did not do so by accident. They did so because someone decided it was worth deciding.

And if you are none of the above – if you are simply a person in India who cares about whether the next generation gets a fair start – share this. Not because sharing solves the problem, but because the problem does not change until enough people decide it is worth being angry about.

What India Is Capable Of

India has put spacecraft in orbit around Mars. It has built a digital payments infrastructure that the world studies and tries to replicate. It has produced, from the most constrained circumstances, an unbroken line of extraordinary human beings whose gifts were larger than their resources and whose determination outran every obstacle the system placed in their way.

It is entirely capable of building an infrastructure that ensures every child who needs a textbook can find one at a price their family can manage.

It is capable of deciding that the annual April crisis – the booklist, the arithmetic, the quiet sacrifice – is not a feature of educational aspiration but a failure of educational systems.

It is capable of making the sensible choice the easy one: the book that already exists, in the home of a family that no longer needs it, reaching the child who does – without the waste, without the debt, without the system extracting the maximum possible cost from the families who can least afford to pay it.

That is not a complicated vision. It is not utopian. It is, in fact, the minimum standard a country with India’s resources, India’s talent, and India’s stated commitment to education as a national value should be holding itself to.

Your children deserve books. Not debt.

We are building the infrastructure to make that possible. One exchange at a time, in every city where a family has finished with a book that another family needs.

The books are already there. They have always been there.

It is time the system caught up.

– BookMandee

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a political argument?

No. The claim that a child’s access to books should not depend on their family’s ability to pay is not a partisan position – it is a statement of basic educational equity that cuts across political lines.

Doesn’t the market already solve this – aren’t there second-hand bookshops everywhere?

There are second-hand bookshops in many cities, and informal markets through WhatsApp groups and school networks. But available is not the same as accessible. A patchwork of informal channels does not constitute an infrastructure – it requires the right connections, the right timing, and more resourcefulness than a family under financial pressure should be expected to expend. The point is not that no solution exists, but that it has never been organised and scaled to the point where it changes behaviour at the level that matters.

What can an individual parent realistically do?

Two things, both immediately actionable. List the books you no longer need, and source the books you do need second-hand before going to a retail shop. Neither action requires a policy change or a system overhaul. Aggregated across millions of families, those two acts are the circular book economy that India needs.

Is BookMandee a charity?

No. BookMandee is a marketplace built on the belief that the most durable solutions to structural problems are ones that create genuine value for all participants. The mission is embedded in every transaction, not separate from it.

What is the single most important change that would reduce the cost of school books in India?

Regulatory attention to the annual edition cycling practice – requiring publishers to demonstrate substantive curriculum changes before certifying a new edition as mandatory – would, on its own, significantly reduce the mechanism by which last year’s perfectly functional books are rendered technically obsolete. A close second would be active school-level policy permitting second-hand books, removing the informal resistance that many schools create without formal justification.