Exclusive: Crisis-Hit BYJU’S Locked Out Of Over 100 Tuition Centres Over Unpaid Rent

In a yet another setback to BYJU’S, the beleaguered edtech startup has been locked out of more than 100 BYJU’S Tuition Centre (BTC) locations across the country. 

Documents accessed by Inc42 show that owners of the commercial properties housing these BYJU’S centres have evicted the company for unpaid rent and electricity dues over the last 2-3 months. 

BYJU’S Tuition Centre locations in UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal are already closed due to such evictions. In other locations, the company is being locked out by the landlords. 

As per the documents seen by Inc42, BYJU’S has not paid water, electricity and garbage collection bills for the tuition centres that are still functional, whereas the rent for these centres is also pending for several months now. 

Queries sent to BYJU’S over the closure of tuition centres didn’t elicit any response. The story will be updated as and when the company responds. 

In March this year, BYJU’S denied the reports of tuition centres shutting down. The company claimed that 262 such tuition centres out of a total of 292 were functional after more than two years of operations. 

As Inc42 reported at the time, under the BYJU’S 3.0 strategy the company had looked to rationalise the costs associated with operating the offline and online learning business. Several BTCs were transformed into hybrid learning centres and the teaching staff was told to take a pay cut and new teachers were hired at low salaries. 

However, sources now claim that this has severely deteriorated the quality of learning and teaching at many of these centres. The rate of new enrollments has slowed down and the company is seeing high student attrition rates as parents have asked for refunds due to the quality concerns and the company being locked out of the tuition centres.  

What This Means For BYJU’S

The BYJU’S Tuition Centre business was launched with much bullishness in February 2022, and at the time, the company claimed it would be investing $200 Mn to expand this vertical. But just over two years later, it seems this bet has failed to bring in the results expected. 

In the past year, offline or hybrid learning has become the lifeline for many edtech companies, including BYJU’S, Unacademy, Vedantu and PhysicsWallah. These unicorns looked to expand their offline presence in test prep and K-12 learning. 

This at a time when the sector has seen a slump in the demand for online courses after the pandemic boom. 

As such, the disruption in the offline business and the BTCs is a massive blow for BYJU’S which is already under the strain of cash crunch, a battle with investors, insolvency cases and unpaid vendor and employee dues. If BYJU’S is forced to scale back from key cities, it would be a crippling setback as the company is already struggling to keep up with its monthly payments, as reported over the past several months. 

Incidentally, just as Inc42 learnt about the disruption in the BYJU’S Tuition Centres business, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) admitted the plea by the Board of Control for Cricket In India (BCCI) for initiating insolvency proceedings against BYJU’S on Tuesday (July 16).

[Edited By Nikhil Subramaniam]