Chandigarh
Coaching centres in the region are going media-savvy. A large number of them have hired PR firms to give a positive spin to their sagging image among the people who regard them as “teaching shops” but still do not hesitate to send their wards to them for coaching whenever required.
“There is nothing wrong with what we are doing”, asserts Mr
N. P. S. Bindra, who runs a leading coaching centre in Chandigarh’s Sector 19. “We are rendering invaluable service to the society which should be recognised and appreciated by all those who matter. This is the age of competition. You have to run hard just to stay in place. If you want to get ahead of others, you have to put in extra effort. This is where we come in...”
Coaching centres are born out of necessity. “We will not be there if we are not needed”, argues another teacher who has made a career out of private tuitions and runs a flourishing coaching centre. His coaching centre, housed in a centrally airconditioned shop-cum-flat, is crammed with students preparing for one examination or the other. Teaching standards in educational institutions being what they are, such coaching centres are the only way out for students to do well in examinations. Parents say that they do not mind paying additional fees as long as they are sure that wards are studying what they are supposed to study and would do well in the examinations.
Coaching centres prove to be invaluable for those appearing for entrance examinations to engineering, medical and professional colleges besides Central services tests. There is no way a student can prepare for them on his own.
However, the fact remains that their image remains that of a teaching shop. Most of them complain of bad publicity they get and unfair treatment meted out to them by the government and its agencies. As a matter of fact, when this correspondent tried to contact them for a lowdown on the coaching centres in the city, most of them shied away. “Is it going to be another anti-coaching centre story?” one of them asked.
At the coaching centres, there is little pretence of a “great learning institute” one may find at some of the leading educational institutions in the city. Money is demanded and paid before the student is admitted. Charges are high: varying between Rs 15,000 and Rs 30,000 for a course of three to six months. And as one keen observer of the scene put it wryly, this is the only “business” which has remained immune to the general slowdown in the country’s economy .
Besides the hiring of the PR firms to ensure a “positive publicity” in the media, the coaching centres have
launched a number of “schemes” to lure students. There is a string of advertisements in newspapers offering short, capsule and crash courses, as well as independent modules offering “100 per cent” success. Many of the coaching centres have taken fullpage advertisements in newspapers carrying photographs of students who had made it to the IAS/IPS, engineering, medical and professional institutions.
A new trend is to organise shows in schools and colleges from where students are “recruited” to these coaching centres. Quiz programmes are organised where winners are offered attractive prizes. At least one of them is known to have offered a gold coin to the winner.
Be it Chandigarh, Jalandhar, Ambala or far-off Bathinda, it is the same story all over the region. In Chandigarh which offers some of the best educational facilities in the North consisting of a university, a medical college, a post-graduate medical institute, engineering college, home science college, ITI, Foodcraft Institute and a host of others, is estimated to have more than 180 coaching centres in the UT. All of them are running at a profit though a few of them fall in the category of “big biz”.
(To be continued)
