By Mr. Vijay Sharma, Managing Director, Optoma India
India’s classroom technology market has crossed the line that separates a pilot economy from a procurement economy. State education departments no longer buy displays in tranches of a few hundred. They tender multi-year turnkey packages in which installation, content, connectivity and five years of maintenance sit inside a single scope of work, and a growing share of that spend now routes through public sector integrators rather than direct dealer channels. What a supplier has to be good at has changed accordingly.
The base has widened quickly. Union Ministry of Education figures released in July show computer access in schools at 69.9 per cent and internet connectivity at 67.4 per cent for 2025-26, against 64.7 per cent and 63.5 per cent a year earlier. The same UDISE+ 2025-26 report records functional smart classrooms in roughly a third of the country’s 14.67 lakh schools, up from about a quarter two years ago.
Access, in other words, is close to solved. Capability is not.
The gap sits in the districts, not the metros
Aggregate numbers flatter the picture badly. Penetration in Chandigarh, Punjab and Delhi runs at several multiples of what states such as Assam report, and the divide inside a single state, between a district headquarters school and one two hours off the highway, is often wider still. Tier II and tier III institutions carry two constraints at once. Budgets are thin, and on-site technical expertise is close to non-existent. A solution that quietly assumes a network engineer down the corridor, a controlled lighting environment, or an annual consumables budget will not survive its second academic year in Nanded or Nalgonda.
Design that starts from those conditions, rather than from a metro flagship classroom, is the only design that scales. Deployments needing no additional civil work, no darkened room and no recurring lamp spend are not a downmarket compromise. They are the format that most of the addressable market can actually absorb, and the industry has been slow to acknowledge this publicly.
That is a commercial argument every bit as much as a pedagogical one.
Procurement has quietly rewritten the vendor scorecard
Contract structure is shaping this market more decisively than any product launch. Central support under the ICT and digital initiatives component of Samagra Shiksha is calibrated per school, with smart classroom grants pegged at a non-recurring 2.40 lakh rupees for two rooms plus a modest recurring allowance for content and electricity. Unit economics that tightly reward reliability over specification sheets. Layer in the five-year maintenance obligations now written into state work orders, and total cost of ownership, not opening price, becomes the number that decides whether a contract is worth winning.
Anyone reading the sector for investment signals should watch order books rather than launch calendars. Public sector integrators have absorbed state smart classroom and ICT lab mandates across Himachal Pradesh, Bihar and Delhi over the past year, which tells the industry two things. Demand is real, and it is consolidating.
Channel depth follows directly from that. A brand that cannot install, train, and service in a district town is not seriously competing here, regardless of what its metro share suggests. Localised manufacturing adds a further layer, compressing lead times and improving service economics in precisely the geographies where margins are thinnest.
Hardware, though, is only the entry ticket.
What intelligence has to earn in a real classroom
Projection alone stopped being interesting some years ago. A room where sunlight defeats the image by eleven in the morning is not a smart classroom, whatever the invoice says. The genuinely useful applications of machine intelligence in this category are unglamorous and specific. Brightness and colour that adapt to ambient light. Framing that keeps a moving teacher in shot during hybrid or recorded sessions. Touch and annotation that let a teacher mark up a diagram without switching devices or breaking the rhythm of a lesson.
At Optoma, we incorporate AI-driven features like adaptive brightness and colours according to surrounding lighting, intelligent content framing in hybrid or video-based classes, as well as interactive touch capabilities to turn a projector into a true collaboration tool instead of a one-directional screen. In this way, teachers can use Optoma’s technology for real-time annotation, collaborative activities, and multimedia content in class without using several devices. The participation of students will become more active instead of being a simple process of watching what happens.
Standardisation remains the unfinished work. Displays, classroom software and content tools bought under separate tenders routinely refuse to talk to each other, leaving institutions with fresh silos and with lock-in that makes the next upgrade cycle punitive. Open interfaces and cross-platform compatibility are hardening into procurement requirements rather than engineering preferences, and the industry coalitions pushing open standards in professional AV deserve far closer attention from Indian buyers than they currently receive.
Three policy gaps still need closing. Dependable power and connectivity in rural and semi-urban schools, for which no display innovation is a substitute. Public-private frameworks that simplify procurement and open financing routes to low-budget private schools, which sit outside central grant coverage entirely. And teacher training, because adoption fails wherever teachers are handed equipment and no method.
The main point here is to make the technology adapt to a classroom rather than changing a classroom to accommodate technology, as Optoma continues to implement intelligence into an AV environment.
The third is the one this industry underestimates most consistently. Technology that demands a classroom reorganise itself around the equipment is switched off within a term. Technology that adapts to how a lesson is already taught and then quietly makes it more participatory is what converts a purchase into an outcome. India’s next decade of digitisation will be judged on that distinction, not on unit shipments.
Covered By: NCN MAGAZINE / Optoma
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