Why We Keep India's Question Papers Free
In this article (6 sections)
Somewhere tonight, a student in a small town is sitting with a borrowed phone, trying to find last year's question paper before an exam. On too many sites, the file sits behind a sign-up wall, a payment, or a maze of pop-ups. At AglaSem, it does not. That is a deliberate choice, and this is why we make it.
The real cost of exam preparation in India
Preparing for an exam in India has quietly become expensive. The private coaching industry is now valued at around ₹58,000 crore and growing roughly 15 percent a year, according to widely cited industry estimates. For the biggest exams, the pressure is enormous: over two million students sit NEET each year for only about 1.4 lakh medical seats, and more than a million take the engineering entrance.
Not every family can buy their way into that race. A national survey found that only about one in five students in India takes any private coaching at all, and in better-off cities the figure is far higher than in villages. For the other four in five, the free material they can find online is not a nice-to-have. It is their main support system.
The gap, in numbers
Around 42 lakh students appeared in the CBSE Class 10 and 12 exams in 2025 alone, across nearly 7,842 centres. Add state boards, entrance exams and recruitment tests, and you have tens of millions of learners every year. Only a fraction can afford premium coaching. Free, trustworthy study material is what keeps the door open for everyone else.
The device is there. The material often is not.
Here is the part that gives us hope. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2023 found that roughly 90 percent of surveyed rural households now have a smartphone, and the vast majority of teenagers, close to 95 percent of boys and 90 percent of girls, know how to use one.
But the same report shows the catch: actual ownership is far lower, especially for girls, where only about one in five who can use a smartphone owns one. The phone is often shared, data is limited, and time on it is short. In that world, a student does not need a slick paywalled app. They need pages that load fast, cost nothing, and give them exactly the paper or solution they came for. That is the AglaSem we try to build.
What we keep free, and why
Our rule is simple. The things a student genuinely needs to prepare should not be locked away. So these stay free:
- Previous year question papers for board, entrance and recruitment exams.
- Sample papers and model papers for the current exam pattern.
- Free online mock tests with instant analysis.
- Notes, solutions and study guides across subjects and classes.
Part of this is a belief about the material itself. A previous year question paper is, in the end, a public exam that lakhs of students already sat. Knowledge of what was asked should belong to every student preparing next, not only to those who can pay to see it.
How "free" actually works
Free does not mean unsustainable. Running AglaSem has real costs: servers, bandwidth, and the work of collecting, checking and organising material. We cover that mostly through advertising, and we offer optional premium conveniences, such as an ad-light experience, for those who want them.
The line we hold is this: the core study material stays free for everyone, and the optional extras never become the only way in. A student who can pay nothing should still be able to get everything they truly need to prepare.
What free changes for a student
When good material is free, something quietly shifts. A learner in a village competes with better information, closer to what a city student with a coaching package has. A family does not have to choose between two children's needs. A student who is simply curious can explore a subject without a bill arriving for it.
That is the real point of keeping things free. It is not a marketing tactic. It is a small push toward a fairer starting line, in a system where the starting line is rarely fair.
The takeaway
India does not have a shortage of talent. It has a shortage of access. Millions of capable students are held back not by ability but by what they can afford and what they can find. Keeping question papers, sample papers and mock tests free is our answer to that, as direct as we can make it.
If this is you, or someone you know, use it fully. Browse free question papers and sample papers on AglaSem Docs, take free mock tests on AglaSem Mock Test, and share them with a student who needs them. That share may matter more than you think.
