What's happening at PhysicsWallah? Ex-teachers break down in viral video

Screengrab from a video uploaded on YouTube by Sankalp

Reality TV-worthy drama has been playing out over the last few days at PhysicsWallah, the edtech unicorn where a group of teachers is busy trading allegations of bribery and internal politics. PhysicsWallah teachers Tarun Kumar, Manish Dubey and Sarvesh Dixit have reportedly quit the platform over differences with founder Alakh Pandey. The three have claimed that PhysicsWallah’s chemistry teacher Pankaj Sijairya falsely accused them of taking bribes from rival platform Adda247 to quit PhysicsWallah.

The three teachers started their own YouTube channel after quitting PhysicsWallah. In recent videos shared on the channel, they explained their reasoning behind the resignation, saying that PhysicsWallah’s mission to provide good, affordable education got sidelined as the organisation grew bigger.

Things came to a head yesterday when the former PhysicsWallah teachers put out a video in which they broke down, yelled and got visibly upset as they issued clarifications on the drama playing out with their former colleagues. They said that allegations of them being paid Rs 5 crore as bribe are completely baseless and they quit PhysicsWallah because its atmosphere was no longer conducive to learning or teaching. They also said that there have been strikes on their YouTube channel by PhysicsWallah despite the fact that they had completed the syllabus before leaving the platform.

The video has been viewed 1.9 million times in just one day on YouTube. However, it copped bad press when a snippet from the clip surfaced on Twitter.

Several Twitter users accused the teachers of crying for ‘sympathy’ instead of focussing on their students. Others said it was in bad form to wash dirty linen in public.

Alakh Pandey had started his channel ‘PhysicsWallah’ – today an edtech unicorn – in 2020 with the aim of making education accessible and affordable to all. The company is in initial talks to raise at least $250 million, at three times its existing valuation, a huge round and a massive valuation mark-up for an edtech start-up.