In Mumbai a tutor's practical range follows the railway line more than the map. Someone who teaches in Borivali and Andheri will rarely come to Chembur or Vashi on a weekday evening, and after Class 10 many students move to a junior college somewhere else entirely, so school and tuition stop being in the same part of the city. Lessons run along the Western, Central and Harbour stretches — Malad, Andheri, Dadar, Ghatkopar, Powai, Chembur, Thane and Navi Mumbai — in person and online.
Two things decide whether an arrangement lasts here, and neither of them is the syllabus. The first is the hour. A child who gets home at half past six after a long commute takes very little from an eight o'clock class three evenings a week, and one weekend morning often does more than two tired weekday slots. The second is the room. A great many lessons happen at the dining table with the kitchen and the television a few feet away, and where that plainly will not work, online is less a compromise than the sensible arrangement.
Boards are mixed across the city — SSC, CBSE and ICSE — and after Class 10 almost everyone lands in the HSC system at a junior college, frequently in a part of Mumbai they have never studied in before. Some of those colleges run entrance coaching inside the college timetable, which sounds efficient and in practice tends to leave one subject thinly covered. That is usually the point at which a family here brings in a private tutor: not for the whole year's work, but for the single subject the arrangement is skating over.