8th Anniversary Feature

India’s new coaching schools boomFast emerging as a parallel education system, the country‚s multiplying supplementary education institutes aka coaching schools have become one-stop shops catering to every need of students from diverse backgrounds. Hemalatha Raghupathi reportsIt‚s a needs-based entrepreneurial phenomenon which has emerged as a parallel education system. For hundreds of thousands of students across the country intent upon topping public examinations which facilitate entry into India‚s much-too-few near-global standard art, science, commerce and engineering colleges, law schools, medical colleges and business management institutes, the supplementary tuition aka ‚Ëœcoaching‚ imparted in the armada of coaching schools which have sprouted countrywide, is becoming almost mandatory. Today, coaching institutes have become one-stop shops catering to every need of students from diverse income and education backgrounds.With entry into the country‚s top rated engineering colleges, especially the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), National Institutes of Technology (NITs), Birla Institute of Technological Sciences (BITS), Pilani; medical colleges such as the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi, Christian Medical College (CMC), Vellore and others; reputed law schools like National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, becoming ever more difficult with every passing year, students in middle class households across the country are willing to live laborious days and invest heavily in terms of time, leisure and money to attend coaching classes which prepare them for the rigours of public entrance examinations. In the year 2006, the newly modeled IIT-JEE (IIT joint entrance examination) attracted 300,000 students competing for just 5,500 seats, while the AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Exam) witnessed 525,000 students competing for 9,000 seats in 117 colleges. The annual scramble for admission into medical and dental colleges is equally intense. Over 170,000 students write CBSE‚s All India Pre-Medical Test (AIPMT) and pre-dental exams for a mere 1,600 seats offered by the country‚s top colleges. Likewise, an estimated 7,000 class XII students write the two-hour entrance exam of NLSIU, Bangalore in nine centres countrywide, competing for 80 seats. And come December, over 155,000 graduates will write the Common Admission Test (CAT) for 1,300 seats in the six Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and a handful of premier business schools.Quite clearly despite post-independence India being a centrally planned economy, the supply of professional education institutions hasn‚t kept pace with the exploding demand for them. Determined to remain the main providers of higher education at populist highly subsidised prices, successive Central and state governments across the country have erected formidable licence-permit-quota barriers to discourage the promotion of private institutes of professional education.Although, despite the rigours of these barriers, a large number of private sector engineering, medical and business management institutes have sprung up across the country, the great majority of them have been promoted by dƒ©classƒ© influence-peddling politicians and profiteering businessmen, innocent of the fundamentals of education provision. For instance, the southern state of Karnataka boasts 109 private engineering colleges and Tamil Nadu 222. But the great majority of them demand tuition fees which are disproportionate, considering their lack of sufficiently qualified faculty and…