Autar Nehru (Delhi)
Kota test prep students: suicides factory reputation
Another attempt to regulate India’s Rs.60,000 crore per year test prep aka coaching industry is likely to run aground. The Rajasthan Coaching Centres (Control and Regulation) Bill, 2025 — the first comprehensive legislation countrywide to regulate test prep institutions, some of whom have attained university proportions — tabled in the state’s legislative assembly on March 19 by Premchand Bairwa, Deputy Chief and higher education minster in the state’s BJP government, encountered stiff resistance from MLAs, including some from the ruling party. The Bill which proposes establishing a state-level regulatory authority for coaching centres, mandates the registration of tuition centres with more than 50 students and subjects them to monitoring by a district committee with civil court powers, was not passed by the legislative assembly and has been referred to a Select Committee for further review and recommendations.
This despite the Bill having been significantly diluted from the original draft released for public comment in July 2024. Notably, a provision barring students below 16 years from signing up with coaching centres — drawn from the Union education ministry’s ‘Guidelines for Regulation of Coaching Centres’ issued in January 2024 — was removed. This omission is widely reported to be the handiwork of the state’s powerful coaching industry lobby that wields huge political clout in Rajasthan which hosts an estimated 1,600 test prep schools in Kota, Sikar, and Jaipur.
The All Coaching Institutes Mahasang, a representative organisation of test prep/coaching schools, has denounced the Bill as detrimental to the industry and threatened to take to the streets if it is passed. The Mahasangh contends that the Bill disproportionately targets Kota, and invests government bureaucrats with excessive discretionary power that will drive “boutique coaching institutes” out of business.
The town of Kota (pop 1.5 million) which has inspired a full-length commercial movie (Kota Factory) has become globally infamous for its 100-plus test prep swot coaching institutes that intensively drill-and-skill more than 2 lakh students annually, for highly competitive open entrance exams such as the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) of the country’s 23 renowned IITs and the National-Eligibility-cum Entrance Test (NEET) for admission into 603 medical colleges countrywide. While the city has gained fame for students who routinely top JEE, NEET, CLAT, CUET and other public exams, its hard-driving coaching schools/institutes have attracted widespread criticism for the intense pressure exerted on young school-leavers.
Therefore in recent years, Rajasthan’s test prep/coaching institutes have acquired the reputation of suicide factories in which young teens enrolled by ambitious parents desperate for them to succeed, are often driven over the edge. In the decade 2015-2025, 127 teens enrolled in Kota’s coaching institutes have ended their young lives by suicide. Moreover, reports of drug abuse, unsafe sexual behaviour, emotional distress, gang fights, deceptive advertising, and inadequate student support systems have further intensified the call for regulation of the test prep industry. Consequently, the Bill to regulate the hitherto unregulated coaching institutes of Rajasthan, has national ramifications.
Beyond the rising incidence of student suicides, another major fallout of the multiplication of coaching institutes is the proliferation of ‘dummy schools’. To write major public entrance exams such as JEE, NEET, CUET and others, passing school-leaving board exams is mandatory.
This requirement has given rise to the phenomenon of ‘dummy’ schools. These are schools duly affiliated with recognised exam boards that ‘outsource’ their teaching-learning obligation to coaching institutes. Dummy schools levy nominal tuition fees and are compensated by coaching institutes. With a rising number of parents according higher priority to coaching over holistic formal schooling, attendance in higher secondary classes is declining.
Principals and teachers of private schools in particular which pride themselves for dispensing balanced education to children are dismayed by the rise of “coaching school culture” that deprives children of holistic education. “Over the past decade, formal schools are experiencing a flight of children to coaching institutes. First from higher secondary classes, then from classes IX and X, and now even from classes VI-VIII. Dummy school students, who pay only about 2 percent of prescribed school fees, are becoming the norm. This has also marginalised subjects like languages and humanities in favour of STEM,” says Dilip Modi, executive member of the Society for Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan and the Independent Schools Federation of India, and long-time advocate of “saving India’s schools from the coaching industry”.
According to Pune-based consulting firm Infinium Global Research, India’s coaching industry currently generates an annual revenue of Rs.58,088 crore which is projected to grow to Rs.1.34 lakh crore by 2028. This booming industry reflects deeper structural issues in India’s formal education system where students are increasingly obliged to sign with drill-and-skill cramming institutes because of poor quality school education and limited higher education capacity. This stark reality is evident in the numbers — 2.3 million school-leavers wrote NEET and 1.3 million wrote IIT-JEE in 2024 of whom 1.12 lakh and 17,385 were admitted.
With CBSE, India’s largest national school-leaving examinations board with 30,700 top-ranked government and private schools countrywide affiliated with it, reportedly set to disaffiliate dummy schools and the Standing Committee of the state legislative assembly likely to pronounce its opinion on the Rajasthan Coaching Centres (Control and Regulation) Bill, 2025 in the forthcoming monsoon session of the assembly, a crackdown on the country’s booming but unregulated test prep industry is imminent.
