Revision as of 18:57, 1 August 2016

The coaching institutes of Kota

The Times of India, June 8, 2016

Anindo Dey & Shoeb Khan

The stress chambers of Kota coaching 

Seven teenagers, all students of coaching institutes, have killed themselves in the last five months in this town of coaching `factories'. In 2015, 17 students committed suicide. Anti-depressants sell like hot cakes. Students are struggling to cope with growing stress levels. The police, however, are not perturbed. Since 2010, 69 students enrolled with the 130-odd engineering or medical coaching institutes in the city have taken their own lives, says Kota SP Sawai Singh Godara. Almost 70% of these deaths were a result of the student being unable to cope with the pressure of studies, he says. The remaining ended their life over disappointment in their love life or over family issues. “You can't say there is a surge in cases of suicide among students. If the annual number of 14 or 16 cases of suicide go up to 20 or 24, that will be a surge,“ says Godara, adding that the `suicide rate' is within `global norms'.

NO SCREENING TESTS

There is alarm in the city .District collector R K Surpur in March 2016 directed the institutes to re-start screening tests that can provide students and parents with a fair assessment of the child's aptitude.Screening tests were prevalent till 2005-06, but disappeared as coaching centres set up shop and competition turned stiff. The result: even students with scores less than 50% in Class XII are also being enrolled.

The state may be mulling ways to make the screening test mandatory, but coaching institutes insist they will introduce entrance tests if the same rule applies to coaching institutes in Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune and Delhi.

TOUGH FOR THE MIDDLING STUDENTS

Students like these two girls make up a sizeable section of students stuck in Kota: living out their parents' dreams. Parents willing to sink big money in the pursuit: over Rs 6 lakh in some cases for a two-year stint at being coached to appear for a qualifying exam to a medical or engineering college.

Hostels range from the dingy, dimly lit room at Rs 1,000 per month to those that serve food of choice, a snooker table and two holiday packages per year, all at Rs 25,000 per month.

It's a far cry from the Kota of the 1980s. After the collapse of J K Synthetics, the coaching institutes became a lifeline for the struggling city . But with the success of the pioneers, the town attracted a host of players, even foreign ones, promising students' victory in killer competitions.

As coaching centres mushroomed in the last 10 years, and coaching became an `industry', many of the lesser known tutorials took on students without any qualifying test, irrespective of a child's current school standing.For the 60,000 children, between ages 14 and 18 who end up in the city every year, there is admission for all irrespective of marks, in many of the institutes.

KIDS ON ANTI-DEPRESSANTS

The stakes are high, students burdened with the need to fare well, and bring their parents “return on investment“. It explains why former member of the district child welfare committee Vimal Jain is a disturbed man. His medicine shop has seen a rapid increase in students buying antidepressants on prescriptions from psychiatrists. He says, “How can those getting 50% compete with the 90-percenters?“ Following reports of suicide, Surpur instructed the institutes to institutionalise systems to deal with depression and related issues among their students. “These kids may never have ventured out of their house but here they have to interact with everyone -from the shopkeeper to the washerman. Even the food they eat may not be their natural diet. It is how they break; simply being unable to cope,“ he says.

The direct feed to parents of scores on their cell phones is a nightmare. Further, institutes segregate weaker students from the better-performers; teachers tasked to spend more time grooming the better ones so that an institute's scores a higher `success rate'. If that pushes a child over the edge, to the point of killing himself herself, it's just another tragedy .

Bihar Tiger Force

The Times of India, Jun 08 2016  On May 13, 2016, in one of the most violent incidents in the history of Kota involving students, a group of nearly 50 coaching students, part of a group called the Bihar Tiger Force, stabbed to death a 19-year-old student Satya Prakash `Prince' and another student on May 13. It brought to the fore the other strand of the Kota story . About 1.50 lakh to 2 lakh students in the age group of 14 to 19 years are enrolled in various coaching institutes in Kota.Around 60,000 make their way to the city every year, about 25,000 from Bihar alone.

The Bihar Tiger Force are the self-styled `helpdesk' for these newcomers.

They receive students at the station, and help them with accommodation and recommending coaching institutes as well. All for a fee of Rs 500. A typical hostel here is an apartment building whose owner rents out the flats. Members of the Bihar Tiger Force are often the mediators. If an owner rents out the apartment building for say , Rs 60,000 per month, to the BTF, the group rents out the apartments to the newbie students, making a healthy cut on the deals.

The BTF is not the only such group, but is the most powerful in the city . At its helm are not students preparing for any test, but those who have been unsuccessful in repeated attempts --well past age 19: the upper limit for appearing in the IIT entrance test. They have stayed on in Kota, making a `livelihood'.

Following Satya Prakash's murder, the police have arrested two members of the BTF.Hostels have been alerted to tell police about all above-19 residents on their premises.