Two Words Against YouTube Teachers

On the evening of May 29, 2026, in a live primetime debate on Aaj Tak, senior anchor and managing editor Anjana Om Kashyap said two words against the whole YouTube teacher: do kaudi ke. Not worth two pennies. That was her verdict on India's YouTube educators, people who, between them, have taught competitive exam preparation to millions of students who could not afford coaching centres, who lived in villages without electricity for half the day, who watched lectures on borrowed phones during COVID lockdowns when every classroom in the country was shut.

The clip moved fast. By the following day, it had been screenshotted, cut up, pasted into montage videos, and thrown back at her by teachers to millions and millions of viewers. In less than two days, this proved to be one of the strangest media scandals of the year, not because a reporter had made an offensive comment (that is almost a common occurrence on Indian TV channels), but because those who objected were not politicians or Bollywood stars. And the students behind them were not passive observers. They had skin in this game. To understand the context of this statement, it's necessary to examine the timing of its release, as its significance was no accident. In fact, it was profoundly planned.

NEET Context: 2.27 Million Candidates, One Question Paper Leak

The NEET-UG entrance exam in India was held on May 3, 2026, with over 2.2 million candidates taking part. NEET is a highly competitive exam that determines whether a candidate will be admitted to government medical colleges or will have to prepare for another year.

On May 12, the National Testing Agency declared the whole test null and void. The reason: investigations had established that a guess paper circulated before the test contained questions that matched the actual paper with suspicious accuracy. Rajasthan Police and central agencies were brought in. The CBI was handed the case. The NTA issued a formal notice confirming the process had been compromised and that the results could not be allowed to stand. A fresh exam date was announced.

But NEET has not had the distinction of collapsing the first time because of such a scandal. Back in 2024, the scenario was practically the same; there was controversy surrounding the distribution of grace marks, 67 candidates stood at number one all at once, and Bihar's Police informed that the question paper had been leaked a day earlier, before the examination, to candidates who paid from Rs 30 to 32 lakh for it. It reached the level of the Supreme Court, where more than 40 cases were registered regarding the cancellation of the examinations. The NTA was made answerable for its mishandling of the situation. But nothing really was done. And history has repeated itself in 2026.

A few weeks before Anjana's speech, there were a whole lot of YouTube educators who raised hell with their government, NTA, and even the mainstream media, for having failed to keep the exam pattern accountable. They did what the journalists clearly refused to do: ask awkward questions, put some pressure, and assure millions of affected students that somebody cared.

Into that charged moment, Anjana stepped and aimed her fire not at the NTA, not at the examination system, not at the officials responsible for two successive leaks in two years. She aimed it at the teachers.

What She Actually Said, and What Made It Sting

During the debate, Anjana accused YouTube educators of sketching things on blackboards not to teach but purely to grab views, do drama, and make money off students. She said they lacked real subject knowledge and proper academic qualifications. She claimed their rise had contributed to a decline in genuine educational focus, pushing students toward coaching rather than learning. And she wrapped it all in do kaudi ke, a phrase that, in Hindi, carries a particular contemptuous weight. It does not just mean cheap. It means under consideration. Not worthy of being taken seriously.

The problem was not that the criticism was entirely baseless. Any impartial observer of the YouTube educational landscape will be aware that there are indeed bad actors who promise unrealistic outcomes, play upon emotions, and offer courses that offer much less than they claim. This is a legitimate discussion to have based on facts, not rhetoric. But what Anjana failed to appreciate was that her comments were a blanket condemnation of an entire community of teachers and, by inference, all their students who benefited from their teachings. That is why she attracted such passionate backlash.

The Teachers Hit Back, and They Did Not Miss

Abhinay Sharma, the mathematics educator behind the Abhinay Maths channel and one of the most recognised names in SSC coaching on YouTube, was among the first to respond. His question was simple, and it cut straight to the point: if YouTube teachers are worthless, who exactly has been preparing millions of students for JEE, NEET, SSC, and UPSC all these years? The implication was clear. The results were in the public record. The selections were documented. The students who cracked these exams with the help of free YouTube content were not a small or marginal group.

Khan Sir, the Patna-based educator who commands one of the largest followings of any teacher in the country, offered a response that required fewer words. He challenged the idea that YouTube educators knew nothing and asked why those making such claims did not simply try teaching students themselves. Then he added, in the blunt register he is known for: tu apna gyaan apne paas rakh. Keep your wisdom to yourself. It was not polished. It was not diplomatic. It was exactly the kind of thing that gets screenshotted and shared two million times by noon. Suman Mam from Ocean Gurukul made perhaps the most pointed observation of all.

She explained that she runs free marathon coaching classes, where any student with internet access can study for hours without interruption, whether they can afford the coaching fees or not. Her question to Anjana was simple: "Would it be fraudulent to offer free coaching to students who can't get a quality education elsewhere?" It wouldn't be fraudulent; it should have been built into the examination system that recently failed 2.27 million students.

Students from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand flooded the comment box on the issue. They were first-generation students from towns where some coaching centres existed. Students who had cleared UPSC Prelims were watching lectures on a shared phone. Kids from agricultural families who had studied for the SSC using free content from teachers Anjana had just called worthless. Their testimonials were not organised or coordinated. They came from anger, from recognition, from a feeling that something they had genuinely relied on had been publicly dismissed.

The Irony That Nobody in Television Wanted to Discuss

The controversy arrived at a particularly uncomfortable moment for Indian television news. Starting March 6, 2026, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had directed the Broadcast Audience Research Council to suspend the publication of Television Rating Points for all news channels. The stated reason was that certain channels were broadcasting unwarranted sensationalism and speculative content while covering the Israel-Iran conflict, coverage the government said was creating unnecessary panic among viewers. The suspension was extended in April. It was later extended again.

The TRP suspension was not a trivial thing. TRPs are the currency of television advertising. They determine which programmes survive and which get cancelled, which anchors get prime slots, and which debates get forty-five minutes instead of five. The government had essentially told the news industry that its editorial choices, the loud graphics, the war-room aesthetics, the expert panellists talking over each other about geopolitical scenarios, were irresponsible enough to justify removing the financial mechanism that rewarded them.

So here, in late May, was a senior anchor from one of India's most-watched Hindi news channels, a channel operating without TRP data, whose broader industry had just been formally called out for sensationalism and spectacle, standing in a studio and accusing YouTube educators of chasing views and doing drama for money. The accusation was not wrong as a general description of incentive structures in online content. It was just being made by exactly the wrong person, from exactly the wrong platform, at exactly the wrong time. The Logical Indian, covering the controversy, noted a tweet that circulated widely during those days: mainstream media had not questioned the government over the NEET, CBSE, and CUET blunders. YouTube teachers had. Then Anjana Om Kashyap got triggered and started attacking them instead of engaging in any self-reflection. The tweet was blunt and partisan in its framing. But the factual core of it was difficult to argue with.

What YouTube Education Actually Built, and Why It Matters

To realise what was actually being dismissed, it is important to see what YouTube-based learning means in reality. According to various sources, India stood second in the list of top consumers of online education in the world, having around 13.6 million learners using platforms such as Coursera, as per data from 2021. This number has increased in recent years. Millions of students all across the globe had their education affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It forced millions of students in India to use YouTube as their classroom.

The economics of what these teachers built is significant. Traditional coaching institutes, Kota factories, and established Delhi coaching brands operate on physical capacity. A classroom fits hundreds of students. A YouTube video, once made, reaches millions. And when distribution costs collapse to near zero, the freemium model that most YouTube educators operate on becomes genuinely powerful: free lectures build trust and audience, while paid test series, recorded batches, and books generate the revenue that sustains the operation. The most-followed educators in this space did not just build large audiences. They built functional educational businesses that happen to offer their core product at no charge. Abhinay Maths, Khan Sir's GK channel, Physics Wallah, Unacademy educators, and dozens of lesser-known but equally dedicated teachers in regional languages built this ecosystem mostly without institutional support, without government funding, and without the infrastructure advantages that traditional media enjoys. The students who benefited from it were not charity cases. They were aspirants who found a way to compete on a national examination stage from places where the stage had never previously been accessible to them.

No Apology Came. None Was Expected.

As of May 31, 2026, neither Anjana Om Kashyap nor Aaj Tak had issued any public clarification or apology. The hashtags continued trending. Educator response videos kept accumulating views. Students kept sharing their stories. The controversy did not die because someone addressed it. It simply ran its natural course, which, on Indian social media, tends to be about a week before the next outrage cycle begins.

That silence is itself a kind of data point. The mainstream media does not generally apologise to YouTube teachers. The calculus of who owes whom an explanation runs in a different direction on television. But the absence of any response also meant that the original question, the one Abhinay Sir asked, the one Suman Mam asked, never received an answer. If these teachers are frauds, who prepared the students who cleared these exams? Nobody from a studio desk answered that.

What This Fight Was Really About

Stripped of the noise, the Anjana Om Kashyap controversy was about something older and more uncomfortable than a single remark on a live debate. It was about credibility, who gets to claim it, who gets to confer it, and what happens when the institution that traditionally held a monopoly on public credibility starts losing it to people with blackboards and ring lights. Indian television news, at its best, performs an irreplaceable democratic function. At its worst, and in the TRP era, the worst has been frequent; it has traded that function for spectacle. The NEET scandal was a story about institutional failure, about 2.27 million students being let down by a testing agency that had already failed them two years earlier, about a system that needed urgent scrutiny. Television largely did not deliver that scrutiny. YouTube teachers did. When Anjana called those teachers do kaudi ke, she may have believed she was defending educational standards. What she actually did was give millions of students a reason to ask out loud which medium had served them better. The answer they gave, in comment sections and trending hashtags and testimonial threads across the Indian internet, was not ambiguous. Television did not teach them trigonometry at midnight during a lockdown. A man with a blackboard and a YouTube channel did. And they remembered.

References

1. The Jan Post - Do Kaudi Ke remark backfires: full controversy report
2. The Live Nagpur - Anjana Om Kashyap sparks row; Khan Sir hits back
3. Hindustan Herald - Anjana Om Kashyap: 1 remark that broke the internet 
4. The Logical Indian -How YouTube educators disrupted India's coaching industry 
5. Mission Ki Awaaz - Anjana Om Kashyap and YouTube teachers controversy 
6. Wikipedia - 2026 NEET controversy: paper leak, cancellation, CBI probe 
7. Testbook - NEET UG 2026 exam cancelled: full details
8. Business Upturn - MIB directs BARC to withhold TRP ratings for news channels
9. Business League - TRP blackout: Centre halts news channel ratings over war sensationalism

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