Late at night, with his phone balanced carefully in his hand, Arjun scrolls through lines of code on a small screen. He is building a website on Vedic maths — fixing layouts, testing buttons, and adding new features.

There is no laptop on his desk, no expensive setup, no classroom around him. Just a smartphone, patchy internet, and the determination to build something of his own.

A few years ago, the idea of learning coding without a computer would have sounded impossible. But for students like Arjun, coding now fits inside a phone screen.

Across government schools, ITIs, and polytechnics in India, thousands of students are quietly building websites, AI tools, and software projects entirely through smartphones.

Behind this shift is CodeYogi, an education initiative that began as an online coding bootcamp in 2020 before formally registering as the non-profit CodeYogi Foundation in February 2025. 

What started with live coding classes in Uttarakhand's ITIs and polytechnics has since evolved into a smartphone-first learning platform designed to make tech education accessible to students traditionally excluded from it. 

Today, more than three lakh students across nine states and over 100 districts are part of the ecosystem, with nearly 62,000 students already building tech solutions directly on their phones.

For Prashant Chaudhary, Rakesh Sehgal, and Priyanka Sethi, the idea began with a simple question: what happens to talented students who never get the right opportunities?

Three people, similar journeys, and one shared problem

Prashant often returns to his childhood when explaining why CodeYogi exists.

Growing up in a village in Uttar Pradesh, he says, even his school teachers knew little about IITs or engineering entrances. “I had heard the word engineering, but I had no clue what it really was,” he recalls.

With support from a few people who helped pay his coaching fees, he eventually made it to IIT Delhi — a transition he describes as life-changing. But while his life changed, many childhood friends remained stuck in the same cycle of limited opportunities.

“I just wanted to help those people who were hardworking but didn’t really have guidance,” he says.

After graduating, Prashant worked with startups and software companies while informally helping students learn coding. Slowly, the initiative grew bigger than expected.

In 2020, Prashant and Priyanka moved to Dehradun and committed to building CodeYogi full-time. Their first programme, run in partnership with the Uttarakhand government, enrolled around 1,000 students from ITIs and polytechnics in a rigorous six-month online coding bootcamp. 

Students attended live Zoom classes after college and relied on computer labs to complete assignments. 

While graduates went on to secure internships and tech jobs with startup salaries exceeding Rs 6 lakh annually, the experience also........

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