With Eye on IIT, Kota Chants Catch ’em Young Mantra

COMPETITIVE TEACHING Parents & coaching centres in this Rajasthan town are leaving no stone unturned in bringing young aspirants closer to their dream destination

DEVINA SENGUPTA MUMBAI

    Lalji Bhai Atul Bhai Katariya, who dropped out of school in class seven, wants his eldest son to become a scientist. The road to this dream destination goes through Kota, the town in Rajasthan that’s taken the entrance-exam cram school business to industrial scale. But this is no longer just about 15-17-year-olds going away for the last twothree years of school to prepare for the IIT Joint Entrance Exam (JEE).
Kota is expanding the market through backward integration by catching them younger. Katariya’s 11-year-old son is enrolled in one of the more popular coaching centres, Career Point, which has opened residential hostels so that students can get started on rigorous competitive coaching from class six onwards without having to deal with the distractions of living at home.
“I want him to go to the moon and if he scores well in his exams, I will send my younger son, too, for coaching,” said Katariya, who works in the diamond industry in Surat, about 800 km away from Kota.
He’s certain that the . 1.2 lakh spent annually on the residential course is well worth it. “I keep all his certificates in a personal bag and display them only to a select audience,” said the proud father. Catering to spiralling demand from aspirational parents, coaching centres in Kota have started enrolling children — almost all boys — from the age of 11. This isn’t about the kind of well-rounded education that a residential school might seek to provide but is focused purely on preparing children for entrance exams over six years. The centres teach from the school curriculum and introduce the basics of topics such as arithmetic progression that come up in the various exams for admission to the IITs and other engineering schools, aside from medicine, management studies and the civil service exams.
“IIT for many is the final destination but there are milestones before that. Students need to benchmark themselves on a national scale and the grounding in science and math has to start earlier than post board examinations," said Nilesh Gupta, general manager of coaching centre Resonance Eduventures. The institute began enrolling class 6 students last year and the first batch of 80 has 20 students from outside Kota. There are about 2,000 students in classes six to 10 this year at Resonance Eduventures and at least 25% of them are from elsewhere. Such a development was expected, said sociologist GK Karanth. "Families who are first-generation graduates or just short of it have urban and global dreams for their children. There may not be enough motivation at home, and for the goals to be realised the children have to start early,” he said. Families in Gujarat, Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra sending 11-year-old children to Kota for combined coaching and schooling is an outcome of government regulation, according to those who run the centres.
Two years ago, the government drafted a rule stipulating that a student needed to be in the top 20 percentile of school-leaving examinations to win admission to a professional course, apart from clearing the entrance test. This was done to ensure that students didn’t ignore classroom studies as they prepared for the JEE, an all-India test for the IITs, the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and other engineering courses.
“Nowhere in the world does one see coaching for an entrance examination to a university have such high stakes in a student's admission,” said Narayanan Ramaswamy, partner and head, education practice, KPMG India. “Over a period of time, coaching institutes have become a key part of the education system. They have the highest growth, attract private equity investments and are almost an aspiration for K12 schools — all this for an entrance examination.”
The reason for such a mushrooming of cram schools is the absence of enough tertiary educational institutions of quality, Ramaswamy said, while pointing out the dangers of such a system.
“This trend is dangerous as it defeats the purpose of learning and encourages rote learning,” he said. That concern finds echoes in the oft-repeated complaint of Indian IT companies that new recruits don’t have a strong enough foundation in the humanities. Most often this is because the Indian
    school system pays only cursory attention to the need for an all-round education, which includes grounding in liberal arts, analytical thinking, public speaking and competitive sports.
Meanwhile, ancillary revenue streams have widened. If the coaching institute does not provide hostel accommodation, either of the parents has to shift to Kota. People living near the coaching institutes have converted sections of their homes into paying guest accommodation for children and parents. The clamour by parents who couldn’t move to Kota persuaded Career Point to open hostels for students last year after having started class six enrolments in 2012. Thanks to this, the numbers have been rising.
In 2012, it had 250 students in classes six to eight, 600 the year after and 1,075 in 2014. “Instead of shifting base, for . 85,000 a year (in hostel fees), parents can send their children to our hostels,” said Pramod Maheshwari, managing director of Career Point, which has 350 students staying in them. The school fee at Career Point is . 40,000 annually and coaching charges are . 25,000 per year.
Those who want to use the hostels need to be enrolled in the Career Point school. But it has tied up with nearby building associations so that students from other schools can rent flats and get tutored for the entrance exams at Career Point. “There are wardens in these buildings and these students follow a study schedule similar to those who study in our school,” Maheshwari said.
Expecting more parents to send their children early, Bansal Classes started a class eight batch this year, while last year it had begun classes nine and 10. It has also built new hostels and most of the 50 students in the first batch in class eight are from outside Kota.
Do the children adjust well to life away from home?
"If they start early, there is no time wasted because of homesickness and they settle into their schedules years before the main tests," said Pavan Shreshthi, in charge of administration at the coaching institute. The hostel fees are . 14,500 per month and students also have the option of studying in the Bansal school. Around 14 lakh students took the JEE examinations in 2014 and of these 1.5 lakh are eligible for the JEE Advanced test that’s meant for entrance to the IITs.
Not all coaching institutions are keen on starting children as early as class six, especially if it means moving away from home. Three years ago, FIITJEE centres in Pune, Chandigarh and Delhi took in selected students of class six after they had cleared a few tests. "Only the above-average can start their preparations very early,” said Mohit Sardana, director and head of the Mumbai territory for FIITJEE. “For an average student, targeting good marks in competitive exams and school tests will be disastrous.” Also with entrance exam patterns changing every year, starting this early may be jumping the gun, he said.