Child education: why starting early is nearly impossible to regret
Education inflation in India runs at roughly ten to twelve percent annually. That is not a dramatic number until you compound it over the fifteen or eighteen years between a child's birth and their college entrance.
A professional degree that costs fifteen lakhs today will cost roughly sixty to seventy lakhs by the time a child born this year reaches eighteen. An IIT or IIM seat — including hostel, books, and living expenses — could cross a crore. And that is at Indian institutions. If the family is considering studying abroad, the numbers are several times higher.
Most parents I speak to know this intuitively. They know education is getting expensive. What they underestimate is the compounding curve — how dramatically the required monthly SIP increases if you start five years later instead of now.
A family that starts a dedicated education SIP when the child is two years old needs to invest a modest amount monthly to build a meaningful corpus by age eighteen. A family that waits until the child is eight — when school starts getting expensive and the pressure feels more real — needs to invest three to four times that amount monthly to reach the same corpus. Same goal. Same child. Just a different start date.
The families who do this well at Dhansanchay share one trait: they started before it felt urgent. They set up a separate SIP labelled with the child's name and a target year, automated the step-up, and then left it alone. By the time board exams arrive and college conversations begin, the corpus is there — not because anyone was brilliant with fund selection, but because someone was early with the calendar.
Starting early with education planning is nearly impossible to regret. Starting late is nearly impossible to make up for without either compromising the goal or straining the family's other financial plans.
The families who compound quietly tend to protect the plan from both fear and euphoria. This is perspective, not a personalised recommendation. Decisions belong in conversation with someone who knows your full picture.