A founder’s note on why the most honest edtech decision is the uncomfortable one.

I need to tell you something uncomfortable.

At Karkei, we are building an experiential learning platform. The whole thesis is simple: children learn better by doing. Not by memorising. Not by underlining textbook paragraphs with green sketch pens. By doing.

We believe this. We’ve built for this. Every design decision, every feature, every conversation with educators — all of it has pointed in one direction: experience is the teacher, not the textbook.

And then we added multiple-choice questions.

Yes. MCQs. The very format I’ve spent the last two articles arguing against. The format that rewards pattern recognition over understanding. The format that reduces the beautiful chaos of learning into four neat options — one right, three wrong — as if the world works that way.

So why did we do it?

The short answer

Because India’s education system doesn’t care what we believe.

Board exams don’t ask children what they experienced. They ask them to pick (a), (b), (c), or (d). And if your platform doesn’t prepare them for that, parents won’t use it. Schools won’t adopt it. And the children you wanted to help — the ones sitting in classrooms in Chennai and Coimbatore and Madurai — they’ll never see it.

This is the reality that no edtech founder in India talks about honestly. We all say we’re “reimagining education.” We all have decks that say “21st-century learning.” But behind the slides, every single one of us is making the same compromise.

The longer answer: design vs. reality

When we started Karkei, I carried two decades of conviction from television and storytelling. In television, you learn one thing above all else: if the audience doesn’t stay, the story doesn’t matter. The best-written scene is worthless if nobody watches it.

Education works the same way.

You can build the most beautiful experiential learning module — one where a child virtually walks through a rainforest ecosystem, touches soil data, runs climate simulations. But if that child’s mother asks, “Will this help in the board exam?” and your answer is “Well, actually, we believe in a different philosophy of assessment…” — you’ve lost her.

You’ve lost the child too.

The compromise is the strategy

Here’s what I’ve come to understand — and it took me longer than it should have.

The MCQs are not the product. They are the door.

We use board-aligned assessments as the entry point. The thing that makes parents nod. The thing that makes school principals say yes in that crucial first meeting. The thing that lets us get onto a child’s screen.

Once we’re there, the experiential layer does the real work. The child explores. Experiments. Fails safely. Connects concepts to the world outside the textbook. And somewhere along the way — almost without noticing — they also become capable of answering those four-option questions. Not because they memorised, but because they understood.

The MCQ becomes a byproduct of understanding, not a substitute for it.

What this means for Indian EdTech

I think we need to stop pretending that disruption in Indian education means ignoring the system. The system is a 600-million-student reality. It has gravitational pull. You don’t escape gravity by wishing it away. You build rockets that work within it.

Every genuine education reformer in India — whether they admit it or not — is making a version of this compromise:

  • You want project-based learning? You still need to map it to NCERT chapters.
  • You want experiential science? You still need to show marks improvement.
  • You want creative thinking? The parent still wants to see a report card.

The question is not whether you compromise. The question is whether you compromise with intent — with a clear understanding of what’s the door and what’s the destination.

The part that still haunts me

I won’t pretend this sits easily.

Every time I see a child on our platform click through an MCQ section, a part of me thinks: we could have used this screen time for something richer. Something that sparks wonder instead of testing recall.

But then I think of the alternative — a platform that’s philosophically pure and practically invisible. A platform that educators admire in conferences but children never use.

I chose reach over purity. I chose the messy, imperfect path that actually puts experiential learning in front of real children in real classrooms.

And I think that’s the honest choice. The uncomfortable one. The one nobody puts in their pitch deck.

Why I actually added MCQs — the honest version

Here it is, plainly.

Not just boards. NEET.

In India, a child who wants to become a doctor doesn’t just need to understand biology. They need to answer 180 multiple-choice questions in 200 minutes. That’s the gate. That’s the only gate. No amount of experiential understanding — no soil samples, no climate simulations, no beautifully designed inquiry-based modules — gets them through that gate.

A parent sitting in Chennai, whose daughter wants to be a doctor, is not going to choose a platform that philosophically disagrees with MCQs. She is going to choose the platform that prepares her daughter for the exam that will define her future.

I know this because I am that parent.

The view from my own dinner table

I have three daughters.

My elder daughter is in 10th grade. The board exam is not an abstract policy concern in our house — it is a reality sitting at the dining table every evening, wearing a school uniform and carrying a bag full of textbooks.

My twins are in 6th grade. They still have that spark — the curiosity, the questions that don’t fit inside a syllabus, the instinct to touch and explore before they accept anything as true. The system hasn’t fully got to them yet.

And I think about this every single day.

My elder daughter is already inside the machine. She knows which chapters carry more marks. She knows how to work backwards from the answer options. She is learning to be efficient at a game I didn’t design and cannot switch off.

My twins are still at the edge of it. Still curious. Still asking why. Still the children that Karkei is actually built for.

I am building a platform to protect what my twins still have — and to give back, even a fraction of it, to children like my elder daughter who are already deep inside a system that trades wonder for marks.

That is why the MCQ compromise is not just a business decision. It is personal. It keeps me up at night in a way that no investor conversation or product roadmap ever has.

Because I am not building for an abstract child in a case study. I am building for my daughters. And for every parent who is watching the same thing happen at their dinner table and feeling just as helpless — and just as determined — as I am.

Holding both

So yes — I built MCQs into Karkei. Not because I stopped believing in experiential learning. But because the child I’m building for still has to write NEET. Still has to face the board paper. Still lives inside a system that I cannot dismantle from the outside, no matter how good my product is.

The MCQ is my concession to the world as it is. The experiential layer is my bet on the world as it should be.

I’m holding both. Uncomfortably. Honestly. And I’m not sure that discomfort ever goes away — nor should it.

Because the day I stop feeling it is the day I’ve stopped fighting for the child and started designing only for the exam.

Elango Raghupathy is a producer, founder of Karkei and ERA Foundation. He writes about education, climate, media, and the systems that shape Indian lives. Find him at elangoraghupathy.com.