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Unpacking the linkages between mainstream education and private tutoring is fundamental for advancing knowledge on tutoring's implications for learners and systems of learning. This paper explores the micro-processes of teaching-learning at schools and tutoring centres to provide a nuanced understanding of the dynamics between them, in the context of India. Using qualitative data from lesson observations, interviews and focus group discussions with 85 participants, the paper explicates the teaching-learning processes in these two settings. The findings and analysis illuminate how actors in one setting shape their responses based on their perceptions of the other, thus influencing their pedagogical practices. The cyclic nature of the resulting dynamics highlights the negative implications for mainstream education in terms of undermining the implementation of progressive pedagogical reforms and inhibiting the need for systemic interventions to resolve incongruities and misalignments within the larger education system. This could result in a potentially vicious feedback loop. The non-binary exploration of this feedback loop has wider global relevance in terms of the nuances added to the theme of private tutoring's negative outcomes. [Translation from Spanish by Mercè Rius.]