We read 349 yoga school websites. None published both prices.

Ask anyone in Rishikesh whether foreigners pay more for a yoga teacher training and you will get the same answer: of course they do. It is not a secret. Every teacher, every guesthouse owner and most repeat visitors will tell you the rupee price is lower than the dollar one.

We set out to prove it from the schools' own websites. We failed, and the way we failed turned out to be more interesting than the thing we were trying to show.

What we actually did

We read every yoga school website in our Rishikesh index that was responding — 349 of them — and pulled out every published course price with the sentence it appeared in. 49 schools published a figure at all. Between them, 169 figures.

Not one school published both an Indian and an international price.

Forty-four published in dollars or euros. Eleven published in rupees. Three quarters of every published figure was in a foreign currency. Not a single site put the two side by side.

Why the absence is the finding

That absence is the finding. If a school charged one price, publishing it would be trivial. If a school charged two, publishing both would invite exactly the comparison this article is trying to make. The consistent pattern across 349 sites is that the English-language website carries a dollar figure, and whatever an Indian student is quoted happens on the phone or on WhatsApp, where nothing is written down.

So the gap is not hidden by accident. It is hidden by construction — one price is published, the other is spoken.

The one thing we could measure, and its limit

We could measure one thing, and it is worth stating carefully because it is easy to overstate. Schools that publish in rupees list a median of about ₹45,000. Schools that publish in dollars or euros list a median of about ₹78,000.

That is a real difference, but it is not evidence of dual pricing, and we will not present it as such. Those are different schools. A school pricing in rupees may simply be a cheaper school serving domestic students — a different segment of the market, not the same course at two prices. The ranges overlap heavily in both directions. Published prices cannot tell those two explanations apart, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.

When we narrowed it to figures we could attribute specifically to a 200-hour course, the rupee sample fell to a single data point. One. There is no published sample to measure a gap from.

So we are asking instead

Which leaves the question genuinely open, and leaves only one way to answer it: ask the people who were quoted.

Every centre page on this site now has a section called What people were quoted. Anyone who has been quoted a price can report it — the course, the amount, and whether they were quoted as an Indian or an international student. No account, no name, thirty seconds. We publish medians with the number of reports beside every figure, and we say nothing about a specific school until at least two people on each side have reported it.

What to do if you are choosing now

That is a slow way to build a dataset. It is also the only honest one available, because the published web will not tell you.

If you are choosing a school now, the practical move does not require our data at all. Ask for the price in both currencies, explicitly. Ask what an Indian student would be quoted for the same course, in the same room, on the same dates.

The answer matters less than how comfortable they are giving it. A school that answers plainly is telling you something about the month you are about to spend with it. A school that deflects is telling you something too.

And if you run a school that charges everyone the same: tell us, and we will show it. You have been carrying a cost for honesty that nobody could see, because there has been no way for anyone to look.