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.
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