Last week, three students preparing for UPSC exams died in the basement of a coaching center in West Delhi. Heavy rains had led to flooded streets. Water came inside the building of the coaching center and gushed into the basement. Over thirty students were present in the basement. While many escaped, three of them remained trapped, drowned, and unfortunately lost their lives. These deaths demonstrate multiple unscrupulous and mismanaged areas – the poor city drainage system, unauthorized coaching centers in basements, the poor-quality design and construction of Indian buildings and overcrowded coaching centers, which have mushroomed all over the country.
The political blame has started on why city streets get flooded and who allowed illegal coaching centers. This column, however, aims to deal with the last point. The coaching industry has had explosive growth. Hoardings of coaching centers dominate every major city in India. An Indian student today cannot survive until they join a coaching center. Schools and colleges are not enough. There are coaching centers to get better marks in school, to clear entrance exams for college, to clear job exams and to virtually achieve anything worthwhile academically. There are even coaching centers to join other (more prestigious) coaching centers! The Indian childhood is no longer about playing in the park in the evening. Indian childhoods are now spent in basement dungeons of coaching centers, preparing to clear some 1% selection rate exam (which was hopefully not leaked that year). And if you get rejected (which 99% of the people will), you are left to fend for yourself. If you have rich parents, fine. They will get you a private college seat or help get you a job through their network. If not, well, God help you.
Actually, it is not just God. Someone else claims to help you too – the coaching classes. The coaching classes of India have spotted a massive opportunity in this sizable demographic – the desperate Indian student. It is a fantastic market. For there are millions of desperate students each year. Just the exam to become a doctor (NEET) had 23million test takers. Multiply that across various other professions and colleges, and you are talking about crores of desperate souls, looking for a rope of hope thrown at them in this thick quicksand of competition. What’s more, next year there will be another few crores of fresh desperate students, and so on and so forth every year after that. If you can offer these desperate souls a chance to crack that great exam, to improve their odds and help them make it – you do become like God for them. What’s a few lakhs of money then, which the coaching classes charge? Daddy will take loans; mom will sell jewellery and the family will postpone essential purchases to get a better shot at these life-altering exams.
From a pure business investor point of view, few industries offer what coaching classes do – an endless sea of desperate customers. No surprise that in recent years, venture capital and private equity firms have poured hundreds of millions, if not billions into the Indian coaching center business. People in India may or may not buy expensive coffee, may or may not shop for expensive clothes, but for sure they will join and pay a coaching class!
The problem isn’t about coaching classes making money. Every business does. The problem arises when the inherent desperation of the customer leads to all kinds of exploitative, unscrupulous, and unethical practices. The first unethical practice is an open coaching industry secret. That the coaching classes mostly know that which prospective new students will never clear a particular entrance exam. Yet, they enroll the child – only because the student is ready to pay. For a while you give the student hope, only to be crashed again when he or she doesn’t make it. The second unscrupulous behavior is cutting corners, such as squishing in as many students as you can in a class or taking the cheapest facility to teach students. There is zero incremental cost of stuffing another body in the classroom or basement. There is hundred percent extra fee coming from the new student. This is why we have overcrowded, stuffed coaching classrooms in ramshackle buildings. There are no guidelines for how the classroom of a coaching center should look like. With investor money backing some of the big coaching institutions, there is pressure to grow – at any cost. And that means a pressure to enroll students, good and bad, and stuff them in classrooms until they choke. Maybe this is why China has banned all Edtech companies to get investor money and wanted the sector to restructure as a non-profit one.
Reform is long overdue in the Indian coaching industry, and the recent incident only sheds light on the terrible conditions that exist now. The biggest reform must come in the testing system itself. To have an exam where a half a percent of people are selected, and students try to game it for two years in a coaching center dungeon makes no sense. What are we really screening for? Paper leaks apart, even with no leaks our entrance exam system needs reform. A more rationalized, less-gameable testing system will automatically stifle the coaching industry and take away their oxygen. An even bigger reform is really opening our economy, so there are a lot more good jobs than we have at the moment. The craze for government jobs (and intense competition) is partly due to the lack of availability of enough good private sector jobs – mainly because the economy hasn’t been opened to create massive growth. Finally, even as all these big reforms take time, we need urgent reforms to regulate the coaching sector. Knee-jerk, draconian measures like sealing of centers won’t help. Rather, we needs a code of conduct document for these coaching centers, where there are mechanisms in place to avoid exploitation and unethical practices.
It is indeed sad that we rob Indian childhoods, make the Indian student go through a rough grind and have created an industry on top of that, which essentially thrives on monetizing the desperate Indian student. Let the recent events be trigger for better reforms so we can pass the ultimate test for any society: to bring up our children well.