Meet the 24-year-old Roman Saini, a medical graduate from India’s premier All India Institute of Medical Sciences who resigned from his post as assistant collector of Jabalpur and started an online teaching portal. He along with his school mate Gaurav Munjal, started Unacademy platform on YouTube for those who wanted to study subjects ranging from medicine and IT to civil services and foreign languages. Its videos have more than 1.1 crore views, and ten followers have cleared civil services exams.  Unacademy has over 400 video lessons made by 31 educators, most of whom work for free. It has 20,000 Twitter followers and 64,000 Facebook likes, which clearly shows its popularity all over social media.

It all started when Saini was in the second year of his MBBS programme. He was then approached by Munjal came up with this idea who himself left his job as the CEO of a Bengaluru based start-up. “My focus is on making quality education accessible. And I think the offline mode is not the way to achieve it,” said Saini as reported by The Times of India.

Needless to say, he faced a lot of hardships, and the most important one was being able to convince his family members, since he had a ‘perfectly good government job with security’. “I had dedicated two years to prepare for the civil service exams. There were many factors were involved, so I consulted everyone possible,” said Saini as reported by The Times of India.

The free YouTube lectures helped a lot students. One of them being Aman Mittal, who achieved  a high 20th rank last year. Aparna Gautam, who cleared the UPSC exams with a ranking of 104 in 2015 and is now in the IPS, is another proud follower of the online portal. 

The technical aspects of the platform are handled by co-founders Hemesh Singh and Sachin Gupta. The lessons are currently taught in English, but they plan to venture into other languages as well.