Tuition town

It is on the backs of IIT aspirants that Kotas economy is now balanced. According to the Kota Traders Association,though the economy is based on the mining of Kota sandstone,agriculture,power generation and textiles,students who flock to the city are one of the largest contributors to Kotas economy.

Ashok Maheshwari,general secretary of the traders association,says,Though the students primary expenditure is on tuition fees and hostel rent,there are peripheral benefits. With so many students,there has been a sharp rise in the number of caterers and mess halls,laundry and cleaning services,clothes,uniforms and stationery.

For a town whose fortunes are so inextricably tied with the success of its students at IIT-JEE,last year was not a happy one. None of Kotas students made it to the JEEs top ten,triggering much nervousness in the town whose economy revolves around students. With three of its students in the top ten this year,Kota is back in the reckoning. After all,in Kota,one lives and dies by IIT-JEE results every year.

The beginning

Once a famed industrial hub,Kotas fortunes plummeted after seven units of the JK group of industries closed due to financial instability in 1997. Soon,other industrial units too shut. The coaching centres would take their place a decade later.

The man largely acknowledged for making Kota an educational hub is V K Bansal. Then an employee with JK Synthetics,Bansal who was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy,decided to quit and take up teaching.

His brother and CEO of Bansal Classes,Pramod Bansal,recalls,He began teaching mathematics to a small group of students in the late 1980s and after a student succeeded in getting into an IIT,he retired from JK and started Bansal Classes.

According to Pramod,in 1996,Bansal Classes began taking in students from across Rajasthan and after a student secured AIR 1 in 2000,there was no looking back.

Following the success of Bansal Classes,several of their teachers broke away and began their own coaching centres,including the now famed Career Point and Resonance coaching centres. Bansal Classes,Resonance and Career Point alone account for close to 18,000 students each and,along with Allen Career Institute for pre-medical tests,form the big four institutes in Kota.

Pramod Maheshwari,director of Career Point,says,In the early part of this decade,there were only a few well-established institutions imparting world-class education. Now,there are coaching centres in every by-lane in Kota. Coaching IIT students is now as commercial as anything else out there.

But Maheshwari says for a coaching centre to do well,results are what matter. One cannot afford to get complacent. A dip in results one year will mean a dip in the number of students enrolling in the institute, he says.

Students agree. Anmol Kumar from UP will soon begin class XI and is looking for a coaching centre to enroll in Kota. Arms full of brochures and pamphlets,the 17-year-old says,I have to be careful while selecting a coaching institute because numbers are deceptive. Everybody claims to be the best and we know figures are inflated.

Though there are many coaching centres in Delhi,UP and Bihar,few match up to Kota. I know several seniors from my school who came to Kota and ended up in an IIT. So,this is the best place for me, says Kumar.

Why Kota?

R K Verma,founder and CEO of Resonance,whose students came second and fifth in this years JEE,knows well the journey to an IIT. An alumnus of IIT Madras,Verma,the son of a stone cutter from a small village 80 km from Kota,says his teachers pushed him to prepare for the IIT exams.

When I graduated,there were no coaching classes,no institutes and I had no money to afford new books,let alone tuition classes. But I managed, says Verma. Though he once dreamt of a job abroad,his parents were against it. They said,You are already in Madras,how much further do you want to go? So,I decided to come back to Kota and started teaching in a coaching centre, says Verma.

According to Verma,Kotas reputation is based on its ground-breaking teaching methods. Most coaching centres in Kota have developed unique methods of teaching. The classroom courses,for which students live in Kota for two years and attend classes regularly,are the most famous, says Verma. He says the system is radically different from that of any other institution in the country.

Career Points Maheshwari agrees. The faculty is all full-time and paid handsomely. The average teacherss salary in Kota is anywhere between Rs 12 and 16 lakh per annum and this assures high quality education, says Maheshwari. There is little government interference and the methods used are scientifically devised to help students develop their full potential. Earlier,we used a stringent filtering system to select only the brightest students,but with so much competition,we cant afford to do that any longer. So now,we accept most students and I am happy to say that on several occasions,we have sent average students to IITs, he says.

Kota has now become a job destination for IITians. Verma claims,In my coaching centre alone,there are close to 75 teachers who are graduates from IITs across the country and they are reimbursed handsomely.

The selection of teachers is stringent. According to Maheshwari,each teacher has to give the selection board a mock lecture and even field questions. After this round,which is exhaustive,there is a personal interview round and then we train the teachers, says Maheshwari.

Even Kotas detractors grudgingly admit that though there is commercialisation of education and perhaps even unethical luring of students,Kota offers quality education. A senior official in the state education department says,Though there is heavy marketing and no government control on these coaching centres,we have to admit that their level of teaching is of the highest quality. Yes,they admit 20,000 students and maybe 10 per cent actually get into the IITs but the others still manage admissions in other high quality educational institutions.

Pushpendra Singh,a B-Tech graduate from Agra,has been camping in Kota for the last few days,dropping his resume off at coaching centres,hoping to get a teachers job. Singh says,I have been trying to circulate my resume but it is not easy at all. I have been teaching for three years now in Agra,but Kota is the best place for teachers,both in terms of the opportunity to impart education and earn money.

The salaries of teachers in Kotas private centres may start with a modest Rs 25,000 a month,but this almost doubles every year. A senior teacher at a coaching centre says on conditions of anonymity,Here experience is the key,every year of experience for a teacher is worth that much more. There are teachers in the big centres who earn more than Rs 1 crore per annum. Many of the teachers who earn about

Rs 50 lakh per annum are in the 30- to 35-year age group. Most billboards in Kota advertise coaching centres,each with a portrait of a teacher.

Apart from coaching centres,there are off-shoot specialisation courses too,like one on chemistry run by P Joy. Vikas Kumar from Patna says,Though I attend a coaching institute for physics,chemistry and math,I do not like the chemistry teachers there,so I joined this special course.

According to Joy,it is his method of teaching that draws students. I have been teaching for close to 20 years now and I have developed a unique method of teaching chemistry. There are 1,100 students in my class right now, says Joy. Though he began with chemistry,Joy now runs the Ables Institute with classes in physics,chemistry,mathematics and biology.

He is now expanding his business outside Rajasthan through technology. Just a month ago,we began a new system called Edulive. In this system,we broadcast coaching classes from Kota to 35 centres in Madhya Pradesh via satellite, says Joy.

Joy spent crores and more than eight months laying the infrastructure for Edulive,including a studio in Kota with high quality video streaming,expensive leased line bandwidth and satellite broadcast technology.

A class in Kota will be broadcast to all the 35 centres in MP and this is an interactive class. If a student has a doubt,he will press a button on his desk and ask the teacher his question, Joy says. Though the system is presently on a trial run,Joy believes it will attract students who cannot afford full-time classes in Kota or cannot leave their homes.

Life outside the classroom

Unlike other education hubs in the country,you dont see students hanging out at cafes or movie halls or even playing a game of cricket or football. Sangeeta Goyal,who runs an all-girls hostel in Rajiv Gandhi Nagar,an area that has most of the hostels in Kota,explains that the students do little else other than studying. They attend their classes in the morning or evening,depending on the batches,and then study the rest of the time. The only time they relax is when they chat with friends, says Goyal.

Most student rooms are sparsely furnished with metal beds,a table for studying and shelves piled high with textbooks and mock papers. There are no posters on the walls. In fact,what adorns the walls of their rooms are printouts of the periodic table,quadratic equations and formulae.

As a student says,the only activity that Kota promotes is studying. I know most of my friends back home are enjoying themselves but perhaps the end will justify the means, she says.

The demands and rigours of fulfilling an IIT dream are evident in Kota,where last year,a hotline was set up for students suffering from depression. Police records in Kota show that on an average,at least 10 students commit or attempt to commit suicide every year even before they actually take the JEE. A senior police official says,The coaching classes are very competitive. If you are a good performer,then you will be part of the A batch and as your grades dip,you will fall into B,then C and so on. We have noticed in several cases that when a student falls from a high performance group to a lower one,he gets depressed.

Plans for the future

Entrepreneurs have begun investing in schools where students are groomed for IITs early on,some from class VI itself. A senior teacher in a coaching centre says,It is a kind of immersion programme. The student will come here and stay in the hostel from class VI till he completes his education. This is a new way of education. He adds that if and when a crunch hits the coaching business,there will always be a fallback option.

As of now,IIT aspirants,particularly those from other states,usually enroll as dummy students in the many schools that have sprouted in Kota. We pay a fee of Rs 30,000 a year in these schools but do not attend any classes. The schools give us attendance and we get to attend the coaching classes and concentrate on the JEE, a student says.

Senior government officials say there have been attempts to regulate coaching centres in Kota,but they have been unsuccessful so far. A senior government official in the education department says,The government has tried to enforce regulations but with little avail for fear of affecting Kotas main economy.

Verma from Resonance believes Kota might be close to its saturation limit,forcing coaching centres to expand into other avenues. Earlier we concentrated only on JEE and pre-medical tests,but now we have AIEEE and other entrance exams on our radar as well. This is the only way to move forward in this business, he explains.