Private coaching has become the need of the hour for about 83% of the students in India. Education is now the new hot pick among businessmen in India. The education system and pressure on the students in this generation areas such that they have a compulsion to rely on the best guidance available in the market which they consider equivalent to coaching. Ranchi, in recent years, has become the new coaching hub in India. It is the new Kota. The craze people have for engineering might be fading in the metros but it is the only thing people aspire towards in the small town India. So in places like Patna, Madurai and Kota, private coaching for admission into IITs had become a booming business.
Students these days start preparing for JEE Main and JEE Advanced from as early as 9th or even 8th standard. These coaching packages usually involve classroom lectures, home assignments, a never-ending series of mock tests and quizzes too in some cases.
Career counsellors suggest that in small towns, people don’t have much career options. They have a mindset which says that engineering or a medical profession is the safest areas to endure a livelihood. Thus, engineering or becoming a doctor comes by default as a career option. The parents have a mentality that the school education is not up to the mark to get students into an IIT. While many wonder if the effort is actually worth it, parents continue showering their faith in these coaching centres.
In the earlier years, such coaching facilities were available only in some places like Kota and Indore. So, the students from small towns had to leave home to fulfil their dream of cracking JEE Mains. Within a span of a decade, branches of these coaching centres sprung up in small towns which made the dream much more accessible than ever before.
The coaching has become an industry now and uses the marketing scheme very wisely. Just 1% of the total number of aspirants makes it to the IITs. But the market these as newspaper headings and people to fall for it, failing to realize that it is a meagre number of students who made it possible while total strength that took admission into the coaching centre was huge. They also upscale their packages. For example, they start their packages from as early as class 6, the most in-demand ones start from class 8 and cost as much as INR 4 lakhs. Lakhs of students take admission into these coaching centres which makes their business scale rise exponentially. The streets are filled with advertising banners of these institutes. They also have repeater batches if you failed to crack JEE Mains in a single attempt. In fact, these days even the TV commercials feature their ads.
There is an up surging demand for the coaching institutes and so they are also increasing the cost of their packages. People who work at these institutes have considered this as a career option and work full time here. They get a salary of about INR 40,000 to INR 60,000 per month, here. In fact, the top faculties get paid in lakhs. They also have a one-month crash course which costs about INR 10,000 or so.
Hoardings of different coaching institutes featuring different packages, claiming guaranteed results in JEE Mains, line the streets in Patna. In fact, there is also an ‘Education Mall’ in Lalpur, where five storeys of hoardings greet the students. Lalpur is the centre, i.e. the coaching hub at Ranchi. In Ranchi, the number of coaching institutes has sprung up from 200 in the year 2012 to 10,000 this year. Bhubaneshwar, Patna and Madurai have also witnessed the spikes.
These coaching institutes which started with a small number of students, say, 10 or 13, now house thousands of students. Students from remote places even come to the cities, rent a PG or mess to avail the coaching. If in a year, a fraction of students does well in JEE Mains, then the next year would see a sharp rise in further admissions into the institute. The future seems to be further blooming for these institutes. The scenario will remain just the same for a few more decades to come.
