– Parul Gupta, Assistant Professor, Dhirubhai Ambani University & Rajeev Parashar, Research Scholar, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence

When nearly one in three school students in India attends private coaching, coaching centres are no longer supplementary businesses. They have become an integral part of the country’s education system. In rural India, households spend almost three-fourths as much on coaching as they do on formal schooling; in urban India, the figure is about half. By Classes XI and XII, expenditure on coaching nearly equals school fees, according to the Comprehensive Modular Survey on Education (2025). Yet despite becoming central to the educational journeys of millions of students, the sector continues to operate under fragmented and uneven regulation.

The recent fire at an animation training centre in Lucknow, which claimed 15 young lives, has once again drawn attention to this regulatory vacuum. But the incident should not be viewed in isolation. Less than two years earlier, three UPSC aspirants drowned when the basement library of a coaching centre in Delhi’s Old Rajinder Nagar flooded during heavy rains. The causes were different, but both incidents exposed the same underlying problem: institutions serving large numbers of students were operating without adequate oversight of safety standards, building compliance and regulatory accountability.

These tragedies represent only the most visible consequences of a much broader governance failure. The rapid growth of India’s coaching industry has outpaced the institutions responsible for regulating it. Concerns extend well beyond physical safety. Students routinely face misleading advertising, opaque fee structures, overcrowded classrooms and inadequate grievance redressal mechanisms. Parents often make substantial financial sacrifices to pay coaching fees without access to reliable information about quality or outcomes. As coaching increasingly functions as a parallel education system, delivering market-ready skills and bridging learning gaps, these are no longer merely private contractual matters; they are questions of public policy.

Recognising these concerns, the Ministry of Education issued the Guidelines for the Registration and Regulation of Coaching Centres in 2024, recommending minimum standards relating to infrastructure, faculty qualifications, transparency, counselling services, fee disclosure and student welfare. Several states have subsequently enacted legislation regulating coaching centres. These are important developments, but implementation remains uneven. Legislation without regular inspections, credible enforcement and institutional capacity risks becoming little more than a compliance exercise.

To be sure, regulation should also reflect the diversity of the sector. Not every tutor requires the same level of oversight. Attempting to license every home-based tutor or neighbourhood tuition class would place an unrealistic burden on already stretched state administrations and could inadvertently discourage small-scale, personalised educational services that households value. A risk-based regulatory framework would be more practical. The priority should be commercial coaching centres enrolling large numbers of students, charging substantial fees and operating from dedicated premises. These institutions create far greater risks for student safety, consumer protection and educational welfare and should therefore face proportionately higher regulatory requirements.

Such a framework should combine mandatory registration with periodic inspections, valid fire and building safety clearances, transparent fee and refund policies, and grievance redressal mechanisms. Regulation should not seek to control pedagogy or suppress entrepreneurship. Rather, it should establish baseline standards that protect students and ensure fair practices while allowing providers flexibility in how they deliver instruction.

Some argue that additional regulation will increase compliance costs or constrain innovation. But the absence of regulation also carries significant costs, borne almost entirely by students and their families. When households devote a growing share of their education budgets to coaching, they deserve transparency about fees, infrastructure and learning conditions. When students spend long hours in coaching centres, they deserve buildings that meet basic safety standards and institutions that take their physical and mental well-being seriously.

The objective is not to treat coaching centres like schools in every respect. Coaching responds to genuine demand and often fills gaps left by the formal education system. But institutions that educate millions of students, shape educational opportunities and command substantial household expenditure cannot continue to operate largely outside the regulatory framework governing the rest of the education sector.

The Lucknow fire should therefore be understood not simply as a tragic accident but as another reminder of a deeper institutional problem. India has built one of the world’s largest shadow education systems without building a corresponding governance framework. Closing that gap will require more than reactive inspections after disasters. It requires a coherent regulatory architecture that distinguishes between low-risk tutoring and large commercial coaching enterprises, protects students as consumers and learners, and ensures that educational opportunity is never pursued at the cost of safety, transparency or accountability.

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