India’s DIKSHA Platform: A Digital Education Infrastructure Analysis

Launched in September 2017, India’s DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) has evolved into the world’s largest free-to-use digital education platform, serving as the core digital backbone for the nation’s K-12 school system. Initially conceived as a specialized platform for teacher professional development, its trajectory was fundamentally altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. The national school closures in 2020 transformed DIKSHA into an essential service, elevating it to the status of India’s “One Nation, One Digital Platform.” This crisis-driven adoption caused exponential growth, with daily user visits skyrocketing from a few thousand to over 30 million. Today, the platform’s scale is immense, actively serving over 200 million students and 7 million teachers across 1.48 million schools. It comprehensively addresses the linguistic diversity of the 1.4 billion-person nation by supporting 36 Indian languages, offering over 19,698 courses, and having hosted 5.8 billion learning sessions. A cornerstone of its success is the NISHTHA program, executed via the platform, which has trained over 5 million educators, making it the largest teacher training initiative in the world. Recognized by the UN as a Digital Public Good (DPG), DIKSHA represents a globally significant model for leveraging open-source technology to democratize education, despite facing persistent challenges in bridging India’s vast digital divide. The technical foundation of DIKSHA is built on the open-source Sunbird ED framework (MIT license), a highly scalable and federated architecture comprising over 100 interconnected microservices. This design choice enables horizontal scalability, easier maintenance, and the independent development of system components. Its robust tech stack includes Apache Cassandra for large-scale data storage, Elasticsearch for rapid search, Kubernetes for container orchestration, Angular for the user interface, and Apache Kafka for data streaming. This architecture allows DIKSHA to process an astounding 1.2 petabytes of data daily. In 2023, the platform underwent a significant migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in Mumbai, a move that substantially enhanced its operational performance, security, and reliability, ensuring it could sustainably manage its massive and fluctuating user traffic. The platform’s most significant pedagogical innovation is the “Energized Textbooks” initiative. This system bridges the physical-digital divide by embedding QR codes into over 6,600 different physical textbooks, linking students directly to more than 10,000 relevant digital resources—such as videos, interactive quizzes, and supplementary materials—with a simple scan. Furthermore, DIKSHA features a critical offline capability, allowing users in low-bandwidth or rural areas to download content when connected and access it later, a vital feature for ensuring equitable access across the country. DIKSHA’s vast content repository includes over 292,000 live content pieces and 1.5 million videos, sourced from 11,000 contributors. This library covers the entire K-12 spectrum and is offered in diverse formats, including interactive videos, e-books (PDF and ePub), HTML5 modules, audiobooks, virtual labs, and self-assessment quizzes. A strong commitment to inclusivity is demonstrated through dedicated resources for children with special needs, such as Indian Sign Language videos and accessible audiobooks. The platform’s content is rigorously aligned with the national curricula of NCERT and CBSE, as well as state-level SCERT curricula, ensuring its relevance and quality. The impact of this content is evident not only in its 5.8 billion learning sessions but also in its effect on teacher development. The NISHTHA program, focused on integrated teacher training, has become the world’s largest, training over 5 million teachers. NISHTHA 1.0 alone trained 1.77 million educators in just eight months across 11 languages. Independent academic studies, such as a 2024 study i n Rajasthan, have validated DIKSHA’s impact, concluding that it successfully “bridged the learning gap” for rural children during the pandemic and contributed to a 15% increase in student retention, particularly among girls. DIKSHA functions as a foundational pillar of the broader “Digital India” initiative and is the central implementation tool for the country’s ambitious National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. It is deeply integrated into the national education ecosystem, including the PM eVIDYA initiative, which unifies digital, online, and on-air education. Through the National Digital Education Architecture (NDEAR), DIKSHA provides a seamless K-12 experience that connects to SWAYAM, the platform for higher education, allowing for a lifelong learning record. Despite this systemic success, DIKSHA faces formidable challenges. The most significant is the digital divide; only 29% of India’s rural population has internet access, compared to 64% in urban areas, and fewer than 20% of rural schools are connected. This is compounded by a lack of access to smart devices. Furthermore, the platform suffers from technical and user experience (UX) issues, with user reviews on app stores frequently citing crashes, a poor interface, and slow performance. Finally, teacher adoption remains a hurdle, particularly among older educators or those in rural areas who lack adequate digital literacy training and time to integrate these new tools. Looking forward, DIKSHA is poised for its next evolutionary phase by integrating artificial intelligence. The government is actively developing and piloting a Personalized Adaptive Learning (PAL) system to be built into the platform. This AI-driven feature will provide individualized learning paths, real-time error detection, and content adapted to each student’s specific knowledge level and pace. The planned DIKSHA 2.0 update aims to introduce advanced voice capabilities, allowing students to use ChatGPT-like voice commands to get chapter summaries, explanations, and answers. To support this transition, a significant focus is being placed on upskilling educators, as evidenced by the Central Institute of Educational Technology’s 5-day online program in November 2024 on “AI in Education.” Globally, DIKSHA’s open-source, non-commercial, and deeply localized model has earned it recognition as a UN-backed Digital Public Good, setting it apart from commercial platforms like Coursera or Zuoyebang. The World Bank has endorsed it as a scalable, replicable model for post-pandemic education, confirming its status not just as a national platform, but as a global symbol of leveraging technology for social equity.