Coaching school boom widens class divide
Diksha Madhok

Critics argue that coaching schools offer false hope to many students and parents.

WITH a sprawling five-acre campus, 10,000 students and state-of-the-art LCD projectors in its lecture rooms, Bansal Classes is bigger and slicker than most schools in India. But the institution, now a landmark in Kota, a city in the desert state of Rajasthan, is neither a school nor a college. It is the jewel in the crown of India’s private coaching industry, a Rs 35,000-crore business that exacerbates the social divide.

Coaching schools have become a magnet for tens of thousands of mostly middle-class families in a country, where two decades of rapid economic growth have failed to improve a dysfunctional state education system and a shortage of good universities. Such cram schools coach students for fiercely competitive entrance tests to a handful of premier technical and medical colleges. Their modus operandi is rote learning. At Bansal’s, hundreds of teenagers are trained intensively to solve complex multiple-choice questions on physics, chemistry or mathematics.

Yash Raj Mishra, a Kota cram student, lives in a tiny room with no television or laptop and spends almost 16 hours a day attending classes, revising or tackling question papers.

“Physics is my first and last girlfriend,” said Mishra, leaning against a wall plastered with notes on kinematics. “I feel bad and frustrated when my friends score even slightly better than I do,” added the 17-year-old, who calls his friends only to ask about their academic progress.

Two-year coaching programmes in Kota cost from Rs 1,50,000 to Rs 2,00,000, in addition to which students have to pay for their regular schools and spend at least Rs 1,00,000 a year on accommodation. That makes the total expenditure a small fortune for most in a nation where the annual per capita income is around Rs 60,000.

“A child is a stack of thousand-rupee notes,” said Manoj Chauhan, a mathematics tutor in his late 20s who could have joined a software company or multinational but chose instead to teach in Kota, where many teachers’ salaries top Rs 3,00,000 a month.

Such cram schools compound the inequalities of an education system plagued by absentee teachers and high drop-out rates, which have left a quarter of Indians illiterate and lacking the skills to match the country’s growing economic needs.

A global survey by ManpowerGroup, one of the world’s largest staffing service providers, estimated India’s shortage of skilled labour at 67 per cent — the second worst in the world. The skill shortages threaten to blunt what is seen as one of India’s biggest economic advantages — its demographic dividend.

With 60 per cent of India’s 1.2-billion population under the age of 35, the country has an opportunity to reap the kind of demographic dividend that brought the dramatic transformation of East Asian economies towards the end of the 20th century. But the country may never realise its dividend if the bulk of these youths are poorly educated, stuck in low-value jobs or under-employed.

Every year more than 50,000 students from across the country enroll in Kota, many of them under parental pressure. The riverside town has become the capital of the multi-billion-rupee coaching industry, thanks to the success of Bansal Classes, which was set up by a former engineer who held the first classes across the table in his own dining room.

The goal of attending cram schools is cracking the tough exams set by top colleges such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), whose degrees can be a ticket to a lifetime of fat pay cheques or jobs in the US.

Vinod Kumar Bansal founded the school in the 1980s, leaving his job at a nylon-making firm, and it was his success that bred Kota’s coaching juggernaut. The centre shot to fame after a string of successes in getting students admitted to country’s toughest colleges — spawning a host of other institutions that were inspired by Bansal’s success. Its website claims that 16,000 of its students have gained admission to IITs, more than any other cram school. Today, Bansal’s school has become a thriving business with annual earnings close to Rs 1 billion.

“In the long run, it has to undermine faith in the education system as a meritocratic system, where hard work and talent are rewarded,” said Chad Lykins, co-author of an Asian Development Bank report on private coaching in Asia. “Instead, the reward goes to the person who can go outside the system and get exam tricks and tips.”

Critics also argue that the cram schools offer false hope to many students and parents, promising results even though the candidate may not have an aptitude for engineering or medicine.

“Actually in a coaching institute you are treated like a rat,” said Ashutosh Banerjee, who fled Kota within a month after getting fed up with his cram school. “Teachers have a lot of attitude and they shout at everyone and make fun of everyone.”

But for most students, the teachers are above reproach and can become mini celebrities in Kota, where their pictures are plastered on city walls.

“On streets, students point at me or stare,” said Chauhan, the maths tutor, who has billboards with his picture around the city. “They have made videos and uploaded on YouTube.”

Seeing the potential in the Indian market, Etoos, a South Korean coaching giant, invested 300 million rupees to set up shop in Kota in 2011, focusing on video lectures and e-learning.

“In terms of revenue, India is going to cross over South Korea,” Etoos’ business head Nitin Chaturvedi told Reuters. “The Indian population is huge and geographically also it is four-five times of Korea.”

Coaching firms have flourished in other cities, too. FIITJEE, a household name for would-be engineering students, has over 60 franchises across the country. It plans an initial public offering (IPO) in the next few months. “People are chasing us like anything,” said R. Trikha, head of distance learning at FIITJEE. “Coaching is actually there because the school systems are not doing their job. Society should be grateful to us that we are fulfilling this need.”

But the popularity of India’s cram schools has helped make a bad situation worse in the state education system. Better pay tempts schoolteachers to moonlight as private instructors, neglecting the poorer students they are meant to be teaching.

“It is forbidden, but enforcement is another issue,” said Anshu Vaish, Secretary at the Ministry of Education. “Typically, what teachers do often is that they won’t teach in the classroom and they will make students come to their homes later to study the same thing.”

The poor quality of state teaching has resulted in a generation, where about two-thirds of 10-year-olds cannot do a simple division problem, according to Wilima Wadhwa of ASER, a Delhi-based education research centre.

The experience in poorer schools can be bleak. Teacher truancy is common in most villages, while poverty can force families to pull children out of school early to find work. Pupils from lower castes face bullying and discrimination from their teachers, and are sometimes forced into doing menial jobs such as cleaning school toilets instead of attending classes. The lack of good schools and colleges means that the quality of the average degree is so low that even those students who manage to get one could find themselves without a job.

“Only 25 per cent of our engineering graduates, on average, are actually fit to fulfil the requirements of the IT industry,” said Binod Khadria, a sociology Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. “So you can imagine the amount of wastage. Those who are left over ... what are they going to do?”

Underqualified overseas students being used as ‘cash cows’ in UK

OVERSEAS students with poor qualifications are being used by UK universities as ‘cash cows’ to fill holes in the higher education budget, a leading academic has admitted. Universities and successive governments have ‘turned a blind eye’ to the recruitment of these underqualified students for years to drive up funding levels, Professor Susan Bassnett said. She suggested that the abuse of the student visa system witnessed at London Metropolitan University was also common at other institutions across Britain.

In a startlingly frank admission, she claimed to have encountered cases of academics ‘earning tidy little sums on the side by assisting students with inadequate command of English to produce essays’.

According to the Telegraph, Professor Bassnett, a former Pro Vice-Chancellor of Warwick University, who has also acted as an external examiner at other institutions, said she had been asked to ‘disregard linguistic competence and focus on content’ by some of her peers. She said some students she crossed had such poor standards of English that they ‘wouldn’t scrape a GCSE’.

“Universities have colluded with this situation for years and successive governments have turned a blind eye because it has enabled them to continue to cut higher education funding,” writing in Times Higher Education magazine, she said.

“Nor are those colleagues stuck at the chalk face with students with poor language skills and irregular attendance likely to do any whistleblowing, since it is common knowledge that a lot of people’s salaries are dependent on the cash cows being roped in,” she added.

According to the report, figures published last year showed that income from foreign students has more than doubled over the last decade to 2 billion pounds, accounting for around 10 per cent of universities’ total funding. — ANI

CAMPUS NOTES

Dr Y. S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, Nauni (Solan)
Dr Khan is new MAJU V-C

DR M.L. Khan, Professor and Head, Department of Entomology and Apiculture, Dr Y. S. Parmar University of Horticulture and Forestry, has been appointed as Vice-Chancellor of Mohammad Ali Jauhar University (MAJU), Rampur, Uttar Pradesh. Dr Khan has 31 years of post-doctoral research experience in nematology, out of which he has spent 27 years in teaching nematology at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He has guided one Ph.D and four M.Sc students and acted as co-guide to six Ph.D and seven M.Sc students.

Project coordinator appointed

Dr Raj Kumar Thakur, a senior scientist in the Department of Entomology, has been appointed as Project Coordinator (honeybees and pollinators) and he will be joining the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, New Delhi shortly. He will coordinate research activities of 16 centres on honeybee and pollinators research in different states of the country. A postgraduate in Agricultural Entomology from HPKV, Palampur, Dr Thakur did Ph.D in Entomology, with specialisation in bee breeding through instrumental insemination, from Nauni University.

New department formed

A new Department of Nematology has been formed at the College of Horticulture by bifurcating the Department of Entomology. The department will have five scientists headed by Dr M.L. Khan. A new head will, however, be appointed soon, as Dr Khan has been appointed Vice-Chancellor of Mohammad Ali Jauhar University, Rampur, Uttar Pradesh. The new department will help promote research activities in the discipline and will provide an added opportunity to students to pursue specialisation in this field.

Faculty promotions

The much-awaited promotions under the career advancement scheme, which were hanging fire in the absence of due guidelines since 2008, have been granted to various associate professors and professors in the university. About 45 faculty members have now been granted the grade pay after these promotions. With about 20 posts of assistant professors being advertised, the university is now endeavouring to clear the backlog of appointments in the SC/ST categories.

Talk on quantitative research

Dr Pawan Kumar Mahajan, Professor in the Department of Basic Sciences of the university, was invited to deliver a talk on “Sampling Techniques in Quantitative Research” as a key speaker at the “International Conference of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Engineering” held at Vijayawada recently. Meanwhile, the technical committee of ICMSC-2012 nominated Dr Mahajan to the Ratnaprasad Multidisciplinary Research and Educational Society (regd) for the IMRF Excellence Award in the field of mathematics and statistics on the basis of his research contributions in the field. Dr Mahajan has also been honoured by including his name on the Editorial Board of Mathematics and Statistics for lifetime in “Mathematical Sciences International Research Journal”. Dr K. R. Dhiman, Vice-Chancellor, congratulated Dr Mahajan for bringing laurels to the university.

— Contributed by Ambika Sharma