"Students in smaller cities weren't losing to lack of effort or intelligence. They were losing to logistics — wrong editions, unavailable titles, inflated prices, unreliable delivery. That's not an education problem. That's a supply chain problem. And supply chain problems have solutions."

Ashish Ranjan grew up in Deoria, a town in eastern Uttar Pradesh that is, in many ways, representative of most of India — aspirational students, hardworking families, and educational ambitions that consistently outpace the infrastructure built to support them.

After completing his MBA from NMIMS, Ashish returned to work in the family business. It was during this time — operating at the intersection of commerce and community — that the gap became impossible to ignore. Students and parents were travelling to larger cities for specific titles, receiving wrong editions online, or paying steep markups at local shops just for guaranteed availability. None of these were acceptable outcomes.

The problem wasn't awareness or willingness to buy. It was access — to the right book, at the right price, at the right time. Three variables that India's existing book retail ecosystem had consistently failed to solve for Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

In 2020, during one of the most disruptive years in recent history, Ashish chose not to wait for someone else to fix it. He launched KitabKopy from Deoria — first to serve local students, then expanding rapidly as it became clear the same problem existed across hundreds of towns just like it.

Today, KitabKopy operates as a growing nationwide education retail platform — online and offline. Ashish continues to lead strategy, operations, and product with the same hands-on conviction that started it all: when the supply chain works, students win.