The Blockbuster Story of Kota

Rajasthan’s Kota continues its winning streak in training students for success in pre-engineering and pre-medical college entrance tests

Getting into an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) is harder than admission to America’s Ivy League: each year more than a million students take the entrance examination for a meagre 8,622 seats in the 16 IITs.

It is equally difficult to get into country’s premier medical school: All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi has only 72 undergraduate seats and more than 500,000 students vie for it. Of course, there are more engineering and medical seats in the country, but IITs and AIIMS Delhi remain the most sought after.

Almost one in every three youths who make it to these premier technical and medical schools are students from cram schools in Kota, a riverbank town 256 kilometres south of Jaipur in the western Indian state of Rajasthan. Kota’s success in these entrance exams has been stuff of legend as the coaching business in this otherwise sleepy town enters its 25th year.

Coaching here is now a phenomenal Rs20 billion (Dh1.2 billion) industry. It is therefore hardly surprising that hoardings and billboards claiming success in pre-engineering and pre-medical tests line the Jhalawar Road towards the south of town.

I am visiting Kota on the back of IIT and AIPMT (All India Pre-Medical Test) results. I find local dailies replete with fullpage, chest-thumping advertisements, on almost every alternate page.

Allen Career Institute is boasting a rare first in the city’s history: all India top rankers in both JEE Advanced, the entrance test for admission to IITs, and AIPMT are Allen students. Resonance, another coaching institute, as cram schools are locally referred to, is claiming highest selections (in JEE Advanced) from any single institute in the country: 4,105, including 1,916 from its Kota classrooms. People at Career Point rattle off statistics from previous years to say they have sent 8,400 students to IITs in 20 years of their existence.

It is that time of the year when institutions indulge in public displays of success. Photos of students with their ranks — all-India ranks, state ranks and reserved categories-wise ranks — are all over the print and outdoor publicity media. Top rankers are bandied around like trophies. Obviously, they are magnets for new students.

This exercise does pay dividends: Allen had 59,320 classroom students last year; this year it has already enrolled 65,000. The number of aspirants in Kota has crossed 130,000 this year. In 2013, it was 110,000.

Vinod Kumar Bansal, who pioneered this business, reminisces about how the Kota coaching juggernaut rolled: “It was in the late 1980s that the first lot of local lads began getting into the IITs. In 1986, Kota boy Sanjeev Arora got the all-India first rank, and received a prize of Rs100,000 from Brilliant Tutorials. This ignited locals’ interest in IIT. Prior to that, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) at Pilani was Rajasthan’s first choice for technical education.”

Bansal began offering private tuition in Mathematics to IIT aspirants across the table in his dining room in his JK Colony residence after he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and became wheelchair-bound. In 1988, he founded Bansal Classes — the first coaching institute in Kota.

Around the same time, Rajesh Maheshwari, a polytechnic diploma holder, started Allen Career Institute — named after his father L.N. Maheshwari — at a rented place in Vallabhbari locality. “Ours was the first institute offering coaching in all three subjects under one roof,” he claims as he shows me around the Allen headquarters, called Sankalp, in Indira Vihar area. Today, Allen is spread across nine hectares in ten campuses.

In 1993, Pramod Maheshwari, a Kota boy, graduated from IIT Delhi but his mother didn’t allow him to go to the United States for higher studies — in those days, he says, IIT was considered a gateway to America. When he returned home in Kota, he didn’t find anything worthwhile to do in the industrial centre which had fallen on hard times. So he began teaching Physics at Bansal Classes. But very soon, Pramod set up Career Point, his own venture, with 51 students in a tyre godown — and became the first IITian in Kota to start a coaching school.

A few years earlier, a boy from a remote village in Ramganj Mandi, a municipality in Kota famous for limestone mining and coriander, cracked the IIT entrance exam with the help of books he picked up from Rampura market in Kota.

R.K. Verma’s father worked as a mine labour and during vacations, Verma joined him in the mines. He graduated from IIT Madras in 1994 and returned to Kota to prepare for one of the most desirable jobs in India, the Indian Administrative Services (IAS). When he couldn’t clear the three-tier recruitment process, he joined Bansal Classes as a Physics faculty, to fill in the gap left by Pramod Maheshwari. Two years after Maheshwari, Verma became the second IITian to plunge into coaching in 1995.

As the rate of Kota students selected for IITs rose, the city’s reputation for success spread, and young hopefuls flocked to the city from other parts of the country. Success of Bansal Classes and Career Point inspired a host of other institutions. In 2001, Verma, along with Lokesh Khandelwal, who went to IIT Kanpur before he briefly taught Chemistry at Bansal Classes, founded Resonance. Seven more Bansal teachers branched out in 2009 to start Vibrant Academy.

In 25 years, Kota has produced about 150,000 engineers and more than 100,000 doctors. Bansal Classes prefers to boast only about the 16,000 IITians it has given.

In the city with a population of one million, around 100,000 students cram for these fiercely competitive tests. Over the years, Kota has come of age. As the number of students rose, classrooms became hi-tech with world-class public address systems, lapel microphones and LCD projectors. Institutes diversified into coaching for the next best colleges such as the national institutes of technology (NITs) and Indian Institutes of Information Technologies (IIITs) for technical, and newer AIIMS and state medical colleges.

A Boom in coaching business spawned ancillaries such as private hostels and mess. Houses added second and third floors to rent out to students. New hostels came up. Eateries and tiffin centres began doing brisk business. Cycle shops recorded surge in sales since most of the students, especially boys, pedal to coaching institutes.

According to a rough estimate, there are about 2,500 hostels and paying guest centres in the city where the cost is directly proportional to distance from a coaching institute, but these days it is nothing less than Rs3,000 per month. In certain areas such as Rajiv Gandhi Nagar, some rooms cost as much as Rs20,000 a month. Of course, these are fully-furnished and air-conditioned.

Cost of cramming in Kota has gone up every year. Besides the course fee, which is anything between Rs70,000 and Rs100,000 per year, and expense on accommodation, parents pay through their nose to meet school tuition fees and pocket expenses. The total cost comes to Rs250,000 to Rs300,000 a year for each youngster.

But cost is no deterrent. The success rate has increased aspiration levels. “Dream sellers”, as one coaching owner likes to call himself, exploit expectation for that elusive IIT or a medical seat.

But why is Kota’s success rate so high? “Because of the atmosphere here,” says Career Point founder Pramod Maheshwari. “Here a student follows a rigorous regimen, attending three lectures of 90 minutes each every day, solving daily practice problems and taking a test every third week. The best part of this regular assessment and performance analysis process is that it gives students an all India competition and helps students know their true standing,” he adds.

“Performance of students in these tests is compiled, analysed and reviewed to help then know their strengths and weaknesses,” explains Resonance managing director and CEO R.K. Verma. “Batches are periodically reshuffled to keep students on their toes and foster a competitive spirit. At the same time, the faculty is always under pressure to generate new complex questions and revise course material every year. Remember, we have to follow a result-oriented methodology,” he adds as he gets ready to head into a class.

Verma, like his mentor Bansal, still loves to teach at least six hours a day though Pramod Maheshwari, also a Physics “guru”, gave up teaching a few years back.

“This regimen is Kota’s USP,” adds Manoj Sharma, Resonance vice-president (Operations) and Verma’s childhood friend. “Here a student is engaged at least 16 hours a day, attending lectures, revising and solving complex multiple-choice problems.”

Kartikeya Singh, a class XI student, who is enrolled into Career Point’s two-year programme, agrees that a student in Kota is always under pressure to perform. “But what’s wrong?” he asks. “My parents have put their hard-earned money on me. Their expectation is justified.” His father, a class IV employee in Bihar Government, has taken loans from friends to fund Kartikeya’s coaching.

In 2012, the government devised a new two-tier JEE system, according to which JEE Main is to be used for admission to NITs, IIITs and other centrally funded engineering schools, while students opting for IITs are required to clear the JEE Advanced test. Both these levels take class 12 marks into consideration: for NITs, the merit list is prepared with 60 per cent of JEE Main score and 40 per cent of class 12 score, while for JEE Advanced, a student has be to be in the top 20 percentile of Board marks.

It was due to this change in the examination system that institutes added Board preparations to their curriculum. Now, besides the six-hour JEE Advanced pattern and three-hour JEE Main pattern exams, students also take three tests of two hours each, which are set up like Board exams. “At the end of two years, a student has taken at least 30 tests, including mock tests with full syllabus at the end of the course,” Sharma says.

Despite this strict schedule, students are losing focus, says Aanchal Bansal, 23, who went to Bansal Classes before he made it to IIT Kharagpur. “When I was here, there were no distractions such as multiplexes and smartphones. There was nothing else to do than study — unless you wanted to sleep all the time. But today there are Facebook and WhatsApp to hook students,” he explains.

Bansal has quit Rs8-million-per-annum job to turn entrepreneur. Aware of the problems that students here face in term so food, he, along with his Kharagpur batchmate Pankaj Sharma, started Mr Hot, a service that provides customised food in disposable packets. In their sixth month now, they are already selling 250 packets a day.

Pankaj says Kota is gradually losing the blandness that was its selling point. “Shopping malls and cinema complexes have come up all over the city as economy grew,” says the 23-year-old who left his job with a business analytic firm earning Rs6 million per annum to join Aanchal.

Another factor that draws students to Kota is its experienced and highly qualified faculty. Today there are around 1,100 teachers in Kota, almost 400 of them IITians. Pramod Maheshwari says he went faculty hunting to IIT campuses when they did their placements. “We picked up the best brains and trained them,” he says. Resonance’s Verma agrees institutions invest a lot in “creating” teachers, training them rigorously for three-to-twelve months after they are picked up from IITs or NITs.

Now, it’s time for diversification as most institutions are branching out into other segments. Career Point has a universe for KG to PhD. It has opened Global Kids for pre-schooling, four schools for schooling, two technical campuses in Rajsamand (Rajasthan) and Chandigarh and two universities in Kota and Hamirpur (Himachal Pradesh), for higher education. Similarly, Resonance has started Commerce and Law Program Division for chartered accountancy and company secretary courses for commerce students and coaching for national law schools/ universities.

Allen, which has been a leader in pre-medical segment with eight of its students in top 10 in AIPMT this year, diversified into pre-engineering in 2008 and after 25 years of its existence, decided to venture out of Kota when it opened centres in Jaipur, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad. All of these have also started foundation courses for students of classes 6 to 10 to prepare them for National Talent Search Examination (NTSE) and various national and international Olympiads.

But Bansal Classes and Vibrant have stuck to their core: coaching for IITs.

Allen, on the other hand, has set for itself a target of 200,000 students in its classrooms by the year 2020. Spelling out his vision, founder director Rajesh Maheshwari says, “My target is to have facilities for 50,000 students in all four corners of the city. At present, the coaching industry is skewed towards the south of the city. For developing Kota into an education tourism city, it is necessary to develop in other three directions.” That could be a tall order but with the pace that the industry is growing at, it’s not impossible, says his brother Naveen Maheshwari, also a director at Allen.

In last couple of years, some unhealthy practices have crept into the industry. “Till some years ago, some institutes poached teachers by offering them double the money; this year, there are reports of some institutes poaching students, too,” says business development honcho of an institute, not willing to be named. A cram schoolteacher, on an average, earns Rs2.5 million per annum but after poaching began, some started getting as high as Rs10 million. As a matter of fact, some teachers at an institute are even earning Rs20 million a year.

“The industry’s growing bigger by the day and some people are want to get the lion’s share,” says the BD honcho. Others talk in hushed tones about some top rankers being imported from other cities and now Kota institutes claim they attended their classroom programme.

However, despite these one-off blots, Kota largely remains a factory where toppers are produced. It is, therefore, no wonder that teachers here become overnight celebrities. Students paste their pictures in rooms, and they are all over the city walls, too. “Some students equate me to Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekanand and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and even ask for autographs,” says Jivanjyoti Agarwal, who is a senior faculty of Mathematics at Allen Kota centre. “I feel proud to be a teacher.”

Sumit Yadav, a Resonance alumnus, who has passed out this year from IIT Kharagpur, remembers “CSS sir” talking about his IIT Bombay days and telling students in his class: IITians banaye nahi jate, hote hain. (IITians are not made, they are born that way).