Coaching for the sixteen operational IITs, which evaluate high school graduates’ quantitative ability in multiple subjects, is now a multi-million-dollar industry. Its nerve centre is Kota, a tiny town in Rajasthan where about 150,000 students are enrolled in a cluster of coaching institutes at any time during the year.
The town’s highly competitive coaching schools have a reputation for assisting students in cracking the IIT entrance exam. Since the business boomed in the early 2000s, thousands have succeeded in cracking this prestigious exam.
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From an industrial town to a coaching hub
Back when Kota was a fading industrial town, the situation was different. Nobody knew about Kota that much. But today, the situation is different, Kota is now a centre for coaching institutes, with flourishing auxiliary industries such as food and housing. In the last 20 years, Kota has seen the establishment of over 25 big and 100 minor coaching institutes.
How Kota become the coaching hub?
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kota began to acquire prominence as a place to study for engineering and medical admission examinations.
But Kota’s journey of becoming a coaching hub started when VK Bansal, an engineer by profession, abandoned his work at JK Synthetics in Kota between 1983 and 1985 and began teaching students at his home. He would teach mathematics as well as provide students with advice on how to pass engineering admission exams.
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Vinod Kumar Bansal. wikimedia
When one of his students passed the IIT-JEE test in 1985, it forever transformed VK Bansal’s life and the image of the city. He then set up Bansal Classes that subsequently became Bansal Classes Private Limited and Kota became a Coaching hub.
A city that had no idea what a structured coaching system was was now flooded with students on a daily basis.
Following in the footsteps of Bansal Classes, Allen Career Institute, etc. Resonance and Vibrant and various other institutes have also established themselves in Kota. Every year, around 1.5-2 lakh students enrol in various coaching institutions in Kota. A typical student’s day begins at around 6 a.m.
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Bansal Classes PVT LTD Kota. wikimedia
Anirudh Sridharan, Chemistry Faculty at Allen Career Institute, in his conversation with the ScoopWhoop told about the duration of classes in Kota. He said:
“The classes in the morning batch start at 6 a.m. and continue till 1 p.m. Another shift starts from 3 p.m. and runs till 8 p.m.”
Game-changer for locals
The institutes have created a significant business for locals by paying over Rs 80,000 per year and making private arrangements for accommodation because the colleges do not offer boarding facilities.
Student PGs can be found in two major areas of the city i.e. Talwandi and Vigyan Nagar. The average cost of living and eating in Kota starts at ₹6,000 per month and rises to ₹30,000 per month as you want more premium facilities.
According to a report by The Print, the coaching business in Kota directly or indirectly affects the livelihoods of at least 2 lakh individuals in the city, including proprietors of the city’s 3,000 hostels and 20,000 paying guest (PG) accommodations, local merchants, shopkeepers, meal staff, auto drivers, and security guards.
Kota in Rajasthan, have effectively turned into coaching factories, producing hundreds of successful IIT aspirants each year. Kota, being the coaching industry’s hub, has seen extraordinary expansion, with a market value of $16 billion.
India’s coaching capital sometimes referred to as Su!ci#e city
Despite being a hub of teen education that attracts educators from all over the nation (the bulk of them are highly educated academics and IIT graduates), the city appears to be deficient in mental health counselling kind of facilities which results in more and more mental pressure for students.
Season 2 of Kota Factory, a much-anticipated series, was recently released on Netflix. The public has given mixed responses to the web series that recounts the life of IIT-JEE aspirants in Kota, Rajasthan. The show provides an honest portrayal of Kota’s extremely competitive educational culture, which few people are aware of. And that pressure results in su!ci#e and other extreme steps.
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Many students end their life because of this pressure and workload. Every year, thousands of students go to Kota in the hopes of gaining admission to the famous IITs and medical schools. However, for many students, the stress of intensive study is too much to bear.
Teenagers who have never lived away from home must now live on their own, cramming 14-16 hours each day in the hopes of a stable future. The demanding daily routine, the rigorous cycle of internal exams at the institutions, the fierce competition, and the crazy pressure to succeed become too much for many children to manage, especially in the absence of constant emotional support from their parents.
The administration had undertaken several initiatives such as providing recommendations to colleges to offer students weekly vacations, refunding tuition fees, and enabling recreational activities, among other things. Former district collector Ravi Kumar Surpur took a personal interest in the matter and ensured that children were screened before being admitted.
However, they are only recommendations, and there is no ongoing oversight to guarantee strict adherence. Unfortunately, but this is a sad reality of the Kota Factory.
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