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 academic infrastructure. Ditto institutes of business management education. Of the 958 B-schools countrywide, the academic programmes of only 50 are accredited by AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education). Hence the annual stampede for entry into IITs, IIMs, NITs etc, which provide high quality education at subsidised prices.According to Dr. R. Natarajan, former director of IIT-Madras and former chairman of AICTE, entrance examinations first appeared on the nation‚s academic calendar when in the cause of national integration, the IITs introduced a common pan-India examination to select the brightest and best applicants countrywide in a fair and transparent manner. “With two national school leaving examination boards (CISCE and CBSE) and over a dozen state examination boards prescribing different curriculums and awarding grades with differential rigour, it made good sense to introduce common entrance examinations which would equally test the capabilities of applicant students for admission into publicly funded institutions of higher education,” says Natarajan.But with demand for admissions far out-stripping supply, in the past two decades private sector educationists and edupreneurs have cashed in the opportunity to methodically tutor aspirants for highly competitive common entrance exams. And with India‚s rapidly expanding middle class increasingly becoming aware of the market value of high quality professional education ‚ available at throwaway prices in publicly funded institutions ‚ the coaching classes industry has grown exponentially and is increasingly being regarded as a threat to the established academic system. Today, the coaching industry in India is flourishing like never before, raking in an estimated Rs.5,000 crore annually by way of tuition fees and growing at 20 percent per year. There are at least eight big players in the organised sector including Career Launcher, Triumphant Institute of Management Education (TIME), FIITJEE, Brilliant Tutorials, PT Education and Rau‚s IAS, around 50 major private tutorial firms and innumerable small and medium players. They advertise heavily and make promises of assured success in entrance exams luring thousands of students into their classrooms. By and large they deliver effective coaching and some tutoring institutions such as Brilliant Tutorials (Chennai), FIITJEE (Delhi) and Bansal‚s Classes (Kota) have recorded spectacular success rates in terms of IIT and IIM admissions. Even in small towns and cities, coaching schools are bursting at the seams with students ready, willing and able to pay Rs.5,000-30,000 for entrance exams preparation. In the capital city of Delhi, coaching fees for school board exams for all subjects is as high as Rs.26,000; and college level coaching fees depend on the package students opt for and range between Rs.22,000-72,000 for the science stream.The IIT-JEE, engineering and medical entrance coaching segments attract the maximum number of students every year and institutions like the Delhi-based FIITJEE (annual revenue: Rs.120 crore) have carved a niche for themselves in this segment. “A highly motivated and qualified faculty, enabling infrastructure, constant R&D and our obsession with excellence, has helped us achieve a success rate of over 75 percent in IIT-JEE. Moreover, students who come to us avail the benefits of comprehensive study materials and personalised coaching. With demand for coaching rapidly increasing, we plan to start more centres, collaborate with foreign institutions to set up joint ventures in India and also enter other areas of coaching,” says D.K Goel, founder chairman and chief mentor of FIITJEE (estb.1992) which currently boasts over 15,000 students and 470 teachers, and offers classroom and correspondence coaching for IIT-JEE, AIEEE and AIPMT exams. Indeed so broad and deep is the coaching institutes boom that private tutorial schools have become an industry which has transformed the character and geographies of several towns and cities. For instance the small town of Kota (pop: 1.5 million) in Rajasthan, once a hub of the chemicals industry, has received a new lease of life following the success of Bansal‚s Classes (estb. 1983) in getting students into the IITs. Over the past 24 years, thousands of P.K. Bansal‚s students have made it into one of the country‚s seven IITs and more have entered the NITs. Since then numerous coaching institutes with an aggregate enrollment of 40,000 students have mushroomed in Kota with Bansal‚s Classes catering to 7,700 of them. The Bansal formula was adopted by dozens within the next few years and today Kota boasts 50 coaching institutes with a combined annual turnover of Rs.400 crore.Likewise the Kakadeo locality in the industrial city of Kanpur (pop: 2.8 million), Uttar Pradesh, hosts 75 engineering, 20 medical and 15 business management coaching institutes within a two kilometre radius. These centres are equipped with contemporary facilities and many boast air-conditioned classrooms, digital blackboards and computerised infrastructure. The proliferation of coaching schools for all types of public exams and the creation of a high cost parallel education system accessible only to the well-heeled, has raised a larger question of considerable social import. Given that tuition in all government-owned and managed institutions of higher education is heavily subsidised, a growing number of educationists and liberals in general are beginning to voice serious reservations about an education system which allows relatively affluent students with access to coaching schools to dominate merit lists in common entrance exams. For this reason, the Tamil Nadu government, arguing that common entrance exams and coaching institutes in particular discriminate against rural students, abolished the Tamil Nadu Professional Courses Entrance Exam (TNPCEE) in 2006 and declared that Plus Two school leaving marks will be the criterion for admission into higher education institutions. However, having become well entrenched as providers of qualitative supplementary education for all purposes, coaching institutes in the state remain unaffected by the ban except for a few small tutoring schools which relied on preparing students for TNPCEE. “There‚s been a lot of confusion regarding the TNPCEE for the past three years, so we were prepared for the ban. Meanwhile we have already established ourselves in the IIT-JEE, AIEEE and AIPMT coaching segments and in 2004, we also started providing foundation courses for high school students in 12-13 CBSE schools in Chennai. We are now focusing on making science and math learning enjoyable in middle school by using multimedia and audio-visual techniques to teach concepts and create better understanding,” says Gita Prabhu, director of AIMS Education, Chennai (estb.1998) which has 15 centres in Chennai imparting coaching to 2,500 students.Likewise, the focus of the Chennai-based Aspire Learning Company promoted by a group of IIM-Bangalore alumni in 2002 is to provide high quality science and maths tuition to students. “Our emphasis is on teaching students ‚Ëœhow to learn‚ and integrate globally renowned methodologies such as neurolinguistic programming, accelerated learning techniques and brain-based learning in our curriculums. We also train students in exam-writing, relaxation and memory enhancement techniques, concentration skills, time management and self-motivation, so that they do well in competitive exams,” says K. Swaminathan director of ALC which provides curriculum support to class VI-XII students and tuition through correspondence for engineering and medical entrance exam students. Today ALC has 43 centres across south India and also provides online tutoring in science and maths to students in the US. Although the great majority of coaching institutes prepare students for the tough entrance exams of engineering and medical colleges, a growing number are providing graduate students coaching for B-school entrance exams, especially for the CAT (Common Admission Test) conducted jointly by the IIMs, success in which is a passport into almost any B-school in the country. One such heavyweight educational corporate is the Delhi-based Career Launcher (CL) which is the national leader in coaching students for CAT. Moreover CL also has an impressive 85 percent market share of aspiring law school entrants and prepares students for IIT-JEE through its Arc programme in Delhi, Ghaziabad, Mumbai and Dubai. Founded in a small way by IIM-Bangalore alumnus Satya Narayanan R in 1995, today Career Launcher has 130 tutorial centres in India, one in Dubai, two in the US and will shortly be inaugurating one in Singapore. The company employs over 300 well-qualified and handsomely remunerated tutors around the world preparing more than 50,000 students annually for entrance exams. Latterly in 2005 it has diversified into mainstream bricks and motar education with the promotion of a playschool chain christened Ananda and its K-XII Indus World schools in Hyderabad, Indore and Noida. Moreover it has tied up with US-based Veritas to prepare students to write the American GMAT and GRE prep tests. “Our main purpose is to help our students achieve their career goals. And our distinguishing character-istic is our carefully selected tutors who receive continuous in-service training. We are constantly innovating and our aspiration is to move beyond entrance exam coaching into mainstream education. During the next five years, we plan to add another 100 K-XII schools and over 600 playschools to our chain while establishing another 150 coaching centres across India,” says Sanjay Shivnani, president and chief executive of Career Launcher.Another heavyweight multi-location, multi-programme training provider run on corporate lines is the Hyderabad-based Triumphant Institute of Management Education (T.I.M.E) promoted in 1992 by a highly qualified trio ‚œ IIM alumnus Manek N Daruvala, XLRI alumnus M Pramod Kumar and IIT-M and IIM alumnus P. Viswanath. T.I.M.E provides supplementary education and coaching to over 100,000 students in its 141 centres in 75 cities across India. Students are prepared for CAT, NIMCET, IIT-JEE, AIEEE and other state-level entrance exams, as well as for international tests such as GRE, GMAT, SAT and TOEFL. “We believe in student centricism and helping our students realise their dreams. Our most successful progra-mme is CAT training for which we have an unbeatable success rate. Over half of the students (773 out of 1,500) who were admitted into the 2007-2009 batches of the IIMs were trained by us,” says Jaideep Chowdhury, programme head (GRE & TOEFL) of T.I.M.E. Now a well-known brand advertised on national television, T.I.M.E (estimated annual revenue: Rs.100 crore) has drawn up an expansion blueprint to add 250 new tutoring centres by 2011-12 to its current tally of 141.The spectacular success of Career Launcher and T.I.M.E highlights the reality that a growing number of India‚s coaching institutes are being promoted by highly qualified professionals who know their business and provide value for money to ambitious students. Indeed several IIT and IIM alumni, chartered accountants and other highly qualified professionals, discerning a golden business opportunity in private tutorials, have given up promising careers in corporate India to promote coaching institutes.In 1987, Jagdish Walawalkar, a chartered accountant and cost accountant quit a lucrative professional career and started Ideal Classes Pvt. Ltd in the western suburbs of Mumbai to provide supplementary education and training to commerce students floundering in mainstream colleges. Since then Ideal has diversified into preparing students for secondary and higher secondary school state certificate examinations, and coaching under-graduate and postgrad students for chartered accountancy, company secretary and hotel management qualification exams, CAT, MPSC and UPSC. Every year over 10,000 students instructed by a 100-strong professionally qualified faculty are tutored in 15 centres equipped with 50 air conditioned classrooms across Mumbai.Today Ideal Classes under its brands such as Scientia, Aamanaa Tutorials, The Catalyst, and Ideal Computer Institute provides specialised training for school board and entrance exams besides providing industry-oriented training and job placement services under the banner of Ideal Job Solutions. “Our focus is on providing complete education under one roof and several of our students have emerged top rankers in school board and university examinations. We are now planning to expand beyond Mumbai and have established centres in interior Maharashtra and Rajasthan. We have also drawn up plans to start an e-learning division to reach students in different parts of India and to promote a business management institute,” says Walawalkar. New online opportunitiesEven while India‚s bricks and mortar supplementary education or coaching institutes industry (annual revenue: Rs.5,000 crore) is growing at 20 percent per year, new opportunities have emerged in online tutoring. Every night, even as the country sleeps, a large number of Indian secondary school teachers are wide awake, seated in front of their computers, tutoring students around the world. With its large pool of English-speaking, talented but poorly-paid teachers, India is poised to dominate the growing transnational online coaching industry. The aggregate annual revenue of this newly emergent high technology driven industry is estimated at $17 billion (Rs.68,000 crore) globally.To meet the rising demand for online tuition from students worldwide particularly in the US and UK, several India-based e-tutoring companies, providing one-on-one cost-effective private tuition over the internet, have sprung up in the past four years. For instance the Chennai-based Tutors Worldwide India Ltd (TWWI), established in January 2004 as a fully owned subsidiary of Socratic Learning Inc (USA), employs 480 teachers in India offering online tuition in English, arts, science and maths to students in the US and UK. TWWI‚s private tuitions menu includes writing skills development programmes, homework help, training students for entrance tests, online support for teachers and development of grade-specific educational content. “We are recognised by the US department of education and work with six state governments in the US. Our teachers have thus far tutored more than 8,000 American students. There‚s huge potential in this sector,” says Mahalingam Vaidyanathan, CEO of TWWI. Flexible working hours, bigger pay packets and the innovative use of technology have attracted many youngsters to pursue a career in online tutoring. “Online teaching differs from classroom teaching. We interact with students through real time white board applications, teach concepts with the help of animation and simulation and a content and tutoring department within the company offers tutors 24/7 support. The pay package is satisfying and we also have a lot of fun at work,” says Roshan Thomas, a chemistry postgrad of Madras University who has been a tutor with TWWI for over a year. While TWWI requires its tutors to work from its office, the Bangalore-based TutorVista employs retired school teachers, college lecturers and other qualified teachers who work from home. Founded by K. Ganesh in 2005, TutorVista employs over 600 tutors in 28 cities who are available round the clock on all days of the week. On offer is unlimited tuition in a range of subjects for a subscription fee of $100 per month. Likewise the Delhi-based Career Launcher provides online tutoring through its US-based division POWERMath which has its own centres in Plano and Frisco. Unlike many other services that rely on computer-based tutoring, each student of POWERMath is tutored live irrespective of whether the student is at a POWERMath learning centre or is being tutored at home. “All our instructors are highly qualified and go through a rigorous selection process. They devote individual attention to students and cater to student-specific academic needs,” says Sanjay Shivnani, CEO of Career Launcher. With the US facing a grave shortage of qualified maths and science teachers, India-based online tuition companies are all set to cash in. Online tutoring companies have mushroomed even in small cities like Kochi in Kerala. Growing Stars Infotech in Kochi was established in January 2004 by two NRIs ‚ Biju Abraham and Saji Philip ‚ and boasts 40 experienced teachers offering interactive tutoring to over 400 children in the US. The charge: $20 per hour.Online tutoring is also attracting the attention of Indian parents who particularly wish to spare their children the ordeal of commuting to “the tuition teacher‚s house” after school hours. Compassbox.com, the online division of Career Launcher, offers online coaching in all major subjects to class IX-XII CBSE students. In the past four years it has tutored over 20,000 Indian students over the internet. With mainstream arts, science and commerce colleges conspicuously failing to make students industry and employment ready, India‚s flourishing coaching schools with their structured programmes and continuous testing offer students a chance to crack the most difficult professional exams. Bhavesh Bhatt, founder principal of Sukh Sagor Institute (SSI ‚ established in 1976 in Mumbai) attributes the huge success of SSI which has tutored over 13,000 graduate students to qualify as chartered accountants to the rigorous pedagogy of SSI. “Our tutors thoroughly understand subjects and prepare our students for the rigorous ICAI exam by using flow charts to solve simple questions in a short time. The time saved is used for difficult questions that require thinking, analysis and factual understanding,” says Bhatt, a chartered accountant, cost and management accountant and doctor of naturopathy. Currently SSI trains 5,000 students annually in its 21 centres across India and has ambitious plans to co-promote 500 franchised centres under its Sattelite Affiliates Programme (SAP) to make low-cost coaching for the CA exam accessible to students in remote areas. Having coached, trained and qualified almost 10 percent of India‚s 139,841 chartered accountants, SSI plans to diversify into coaching students for IAS, IIT, AIEEE, PMT, CAT and CET exams and also offer vocational training programmes in plumbing, carpentry and masonry. “In the medium term we plan to build a video library of eminent speakers, scholars and teachers and beam their lectures countrywide through the V Sat network which will also be used to conduct online tuitions, interviews and corporate training,” says Bhatt. The entry of highly qualified business and corporate professionals like Satya Narayanan, the T.I.M.E trio, Walawalkar and Bhavesh Bhatt into the coaching classes ‚Ëœindustry‚ has also attracted committed professionals into teaching ‚ a notoriously ill-remunerated vocation in professedly socialist India. Well-qualified profess-ionals willing to work full-time are pivotal to the booming supplementary education and training business. “Our strength is the delivery of globally accepted curriculums by well trained teachers, and continuous assessment of students,” says Mahesh Shetty who jointly with B. Narayanan Iyer founded MT Educare in Mumbai in 1988. Incorporated as a private limited company in February 2007, MT Educare boasts a chain of 107 learning centres across Maharashtra, south India and one in Dubai. A faculty of 500 prepares an aggregate 17,500 students for school board exams, a range of public competitive exams, GRE, TOEFL and IELTS. In addition, it runs a pre-school, offers communication development courses and has a corporate soft skills training division. With the Mauritius-based Helix Investments having invested $12 million (Rs.48 crore in the holding company recently, MT Educare has drawn up plans to expand to states like Gujarat, Goa, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Delhi and establish its footprint in the Middle East, south-east Asia, the UK and US.Indisputably, the coaching institutes‚ boom has helped thousands of students in big cities and small towns to round off their school and college education and enter premier institutes of professional education while simultaneously creating well-paid job opportunities for teachers and business management professionals. The growth and expansion of the private tutorials industry countrywide is an indication that coaching schools have filled a lacuna in school and collegiate education and are effectively supplem-enting the indifferent tuition being dispensed by unmotivated teachers in the nation‚s crowded classrooms. “In the recent past the quality of instruction in schools and colleges has deteriorated significantly due to their inability to attract the best graduate talent into teaching careers. Moreover the ban on teacher recruitment in many states, ad hoc appointment of teachers on contract, declaration of holidays at the drop of a hat which makes it impossible for teachers to complete the syllabus, have compelled students and parents to turn to coaching schools. Coaching institutes also pay their teachers better, take their responsibilities seriously, strictly adhere to syllabus completion deadlines and provide useful guidance on tackling competitive exams. To develop olympic athletes, test cricket players, hockey internationals etc, coaching camps are widely accepted. Therefore it‚s important to introspect and address the causes of the proliferation of coaching schools and their popularity,” says Dr. R. Natarajan, the knowledgeable former director of IIT-M and former chairman of the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE).Quite obviously, coaching institutes fulfill an increasingly felt need, and are here to stay. And flourish.With Autar Nehru (Delhi) & Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)