Every Indian, particularly of the educated middle class, dreams of sending his/her child to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology. This in turn spawned a whole “coaching class” industry for which Kota in Rajasthan has been a hub for the last couple of decades. It is estimated to be an industry of around Rs. 600 crores!
This industry grew at about 20-25 % year on year providing a livelihood not only for those who taught in the coaching classes but also for those who provided the students in their thousands with hostels, rooms, food and so on. Every year some 30,000 aspirants came there with dreams in their eyes funded by their equally dreamy eyed parents. Today, they have to shell out Rs. 2.5 to 3 lakhs(250,000 -300,000) per annum for their wards. Like in any business, the costs have spiralled and with many players crowding Kota it has become a high cost centre. To cap it off the glorious results of the past years, where many of the toppers who succeeded in cracking the tough IIT-JEE exams came from these coaching classes in Kota didn’t happen last year.
Read this interesting article in the Economic Times on the dip in business for the hub of IIT coaching classes in Kota. This year the incoming batches were a mere 8,000 compared to the usual 30,000 per year. Unless Kota pulls up its socks, we could find that the Top 100 ranks in the IIT-JEE no longer seem to have ” a quota” for Kota.
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