What this tragedy highlights are the threats posed to students by India’s parallel education system – the coaching industry. While there is no discounting the culpability of municipal and local authorities – who have constantly failed to ensure coaching centres adhere to rules and regulations – the deaths should pave the way for structural reform in India’s education sector. After all, how does the drowning of civil service aspirants in drain water and deluge reflect on the nation as a whole? Rest assured, it does not paint a rosy picture for either our present or the future.
India’s coaching industry is an emerging behemoth. There are over 68,000 coaching institutes in India – all overselling the dream of a successful career to millions of students. The revenue of the Indian coaching industry is estimated to reach Rs 1.34 lakh crore by 2028. Interestingly, the GST collected from such institutes over the past five years has more than doubled to Rs 5,517 crore.
This indicates not just a burgeoning demand for such coaching institutes, but also a rise in the number of students opting for coaching due to one, the failures of India’s formal education system and two, the overboard marketing undertaken by coaching institutes to enrol more students, and consequently, mint more money. The UPSC coaching industry alone is valued at over Rs 3,000 crore. For all the revenue it generates, students are provided sub-human living conditions, apathetic infrastructure and unimaginable mental and psychological stress. A visit to Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar can reveal as much.
Here are some numbers which show how India’s coaching industry is nothing but a profit-making machine, which has revenue as its primary driving force, and not the urge to help students realise their dreams. Indian students are being duped and betrayed on a daily basis, while their dreams are reduced to a weakness coaching centres make a fortune out of.
In Kota, the coaching capital of India for engineering and medical entrance exams, at least 26 aspirants committed suicide in 2023 – the highest since 2015. In fact, close to 130 students have taken their own lives since 2015 in Kota alone. None of these tragedies have brought about a change in India’s coaching culture. The fact is, matters are only going from bad to worse.
Due to the inability of our education system to prepare students for competitive exams or equipping them with skills needed in the job market, the country is now seeing a mushrooming of the coaching industry. Coaching centres are not supposed to be institutes which students have to mandatorily enrol in if they want to crack tough examinations. Unfortunately, that is exactly what they have become. We now have a situation where students who choose not to enrol in such coaching centres, or simply cannot afford them are at a distinct disadvantage to those who slog it out in Kota or Delhi’s Mukherjee and Rajinder Nagars.
Cracking the Whip on Coaching Nexus: The Way Forward
Over the past few years, Indians across cities and towns have seen a new addition to the urban landscape – big, colourful flex banners and posters marketing a host of coaching institutes to aspirational families. Coaching institutes sell what matters most to Indians: a lucrative career with guaranteed success. The success is obviously not guaranteed, but coaching centres promise it just the same.
If UPSC, JEE, NEET and CAT coaching institutes were not enough, we now also have centres promising students a glittering performance in the Common University Entrance Test (CUET). That’s still not all. Coaching institutes are also doubling down as centres which lure Indian youth with the promise of jobs. Given how the youth is struggling to find employment, coaching centres that promise to equip them with skills needed in the job market are flourishing too.
Apart from forcing students to live in unhygienic, unsafe, crammed up ghettos and study in rooms with no ventilation, coaching centres are culpable of other travesties too. The revenue generated by coaching institutes comes out of the pockets of modest Indian families who want to see their children succeed in life. These are children that almost always hail from the lower-middle or middle-income class.
Instead of using the money they make to improve students’ learning and living experience, coaching centres spend most of it on marketing and advertising themselves, apart from paying handsome salaries to faculty – many of whom are former bureaucrats, as well as doctors and engineers themselves. That the owners of such institutes make a fortune out of the misery of desperate students is a known fact. Coaching institutes are guilty of overselling the idea of competitive examinations to the youth, to the extent that many now believe that enrolment in a “good" institute is all that is needed to make the cut.
It is not as if the founders and bosses of such coaching centres do not know what they are up to. Everyone in the business knows how there is a major demand-supply deficit in the number of students sitting for competitive examinations and the number of them succeeding. In 2022, over 11 lakh aspirants sat for the UPSC exam. How many seats were they competing for? A meagre 1,022. Similarly, more than 14 million students sat for JEE this year. They were all competing with each other for roughly 59,917 seats. Speaking of NEET, 2.3 million candidates competed with each other for just about one lakh seats.
The commercialisation of education in India is complete, and most of it has been driven by the coaching industry’s incessant want for profits and stardom. However, the coaching industry, for all its faults is, after all, a business. A major share of the blame must also be directed towards India’s redundant education system, which is constantly failing students. The failure of our education system has created a situation where a shadow system now flourishes – in which aspirants enrol into dummy schools in order to complete their higher education, all while attending classes at coaching centres where the focus is rigidly academic.
The time to regulate the coaching industry is now. Earlier this year, the central government came out with guidelines on how coaching centres must operate. As is evident from the recent tragedy, such guidelines exist only on paper. Local administrative authorities and state governments appear least interested in enforcing these guidelines, as a result of which they constantly put students’ lives in danger. The onus is now on central government to bring out a national law to deal with the coaching industry, and make it fall in line. It is the least India owes its youth.
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