In the depths of exam study hell, he founded an edtech startup

Rohit Pande, Civilsdaily co-founder and CEO

The point of utter desperation. It comes to us, perhaps, in the form of the sunrise after an all-nighter in the library or at our desks. It’s a point where coffee doesn’t work anymore and words start sliding together on the pages in front of us. It’s the point where we’re weighing the benefit of sleep against the benefit of studying this one more thing. Maybe we were there because we were cramming. Maybe we were there because we did everything right and found that there was still too much material.

At that point, a thought crosses our minds. There has got to be a better way. A quicker way to study. A way to go on less sleep. Divine intervention. Something.

Several of us have made the harrowing journey to study hell. Very few of us got a startup out of it. But that’s exactly what Rohit Pande did.

In 2014, Rohit was studying for India’s civil service exams with his friends. The exam, or the UPSC, is one of the hardest career aptitude tests in the country. Test takers have to be well studied in current events, including the context behind each news development.

The extensive studying grated on him and his friends, but instead of cracking under the pressure, Rohit persevered and got an idea.

“Usually, people like us consume news by hashtags on newsfeeds or social media,” Rohit explains. “We don’t usually give much headway to news unless it becomes unique in some way.” Or, he adds, unless you’re taking a test evaluating your knowledge regardless of news popularity. Opinionated news with left or right leanings makes it even harder to discern the real from the opinion.

News for dummies

Shikhar Sachan, co-founder of Civilsdaily

In early March, Rohit, his co-founder Shikhar Sachan, and their team launched the answer to their headaches: Civilsdaily, a Delhi-based education and media startup that offers news with context, not keywords. The company offers information on events online and in a mobile app in flashcard format, like information on G20, for example, simplified down to bullet points for easy consumption.

Civilsdaily presents its information as a list of headlines. Information covered falls under economics, environment, geography, history, politics, science and tech, trivia, and world events. Newscards, or flashcards, fall under each headline, along with curated information from the past. When readers are finished, they can then go to an infographic that explains the topic in more depth, in what Rohit describes as a “for dummies” kind of approach.

“Essentially, we have a product [that] helps curate hierarchies of content,” Rohit explains. He believes that presenting the information this way satisfies today’s readers’ desire for instant gratification in their content consumption and gives them a more holistic understanding of the news.

Each news piece is hand-curated by Rohit and his 10-person team, with every member master of a specific domain. The result is a just-the-facts approach to understanding current events.

“We go through the original [articles]. We strip down the opinions. We strip down the original noise, and we pick up the facts. Then, [we] line them up in queue,” says Rohit.

Taking the news to edtech

Teachers’ spirit