Inside India's Cram City
In Kota, students from across the country pay steep fees to be tutored for elite-college admissions exams — which most of them will fail.
Inside India's Cram City
In Kota, students from across the country pay steep fees to be tutored for elite-college admissions exams — which most of them will fail.
Every summer, when hot winds sweep up from the deserts in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, trains packed with students from the countryside ride into Kota, one of the state’s most populated cities dedicated to medical and engineering test-prep.
Roughly 200,000 students arrive in Kota every year, many of them from the poorest corners of the country. They include children of fruit vendors, farm hands, welders, freight truck drivers, construction workers, sweepers and rickshaw-pullers. Their families take on a lifetime of debt to pay between $2,500 and $3,000 for twelve months of test-prep to bet on their chances of admission to elite colleges and in turn placements into well-paid jobs as doctors and engineers.
The city’s coaching industry includes approximately 300 institutes that generate between $350 to $500 million. The largest coaching center occupies 19 buildings in the city employing over 2,000 teachers and coaches and instructing one million students.
Of the students who arrive in Kota every year, less than 2% are accepted to elite colleges. They are known as “toppers” for scoring the highest marks and are seen as the engines of the country’s economic success. They go on to graduate as doctors and engineers from elite schools and burnish the country’s image abroad. Everywhere you turn in Kota, the faces of toppers look down on you from billboards advertising the coaching center that tutored them.
The vast majority of the students fail. Some stay back and retake the test, sometimes eight or nine times, until their hopes are extinguished by their finances. Some drop out to return home to their villages to find temp-work. Some accept offers in lesser-known colleges whose graduates consider themselves lucky to find jobs that pay a fraction of the salary offered to graduates of elite colleges. Some drop out of the work force, mostly young women, for marriage.
The fear of being left behind is a palpable misery in this city. The two main neighborhoods in Kota—Vigyan Nagar and Landmark City—have the feel of an open-air museum of Indian anxieties. Its narrow lanes are crammed with student boarding houses, restaurants offering home-style tiffin services and private lessons with celebrity teachers who go by names such as Sodium Sir and Ninja Sir. A corner store sell mock tests along with shampoo and cooking oil. Food-carts hand out samosas wrapped in textbook paper. Bookstores display biographies of famous engineers alongside self-help books on personality development. Coffee mugs come printed with threats: “If you are not scared and restless, your dreams are too small.” Swarms of teenage boys and girls walk silently in horizontal gangs behind herds of scavenging donkeys. Kota is a place designed for the strivers of India.
“Earlier if I wanted a bag of rice, I would go to a grocery store. If I wanted a shirt, I would go to a clothes shop. But when mall culture came, everything became available under one roof,” Nitesh Sharma, the media director of the Allen Career Institute, said. “In the same way, Kota is a city of educational malls.”
2.
Across Asian societies, cram schools thrive in exam-oriented learning cultures. They are known as juku in Japan, buxiban in China and Taiwan, bimbel in Indonesia, hagwons in South Korea, special classes in Thailand and academies in Pakistan. In India, they are known as coaching centers and Kota is an entire city dedicated to coaching.
After the economic reforms of 1991, which introduced privatized education, coaching centers began sprouting in residential communities across cities and towns, crammed between temples, groceries, banks and beauty salons. Unlike other systems that are seen as easily corruptible, attending an elite college represented a route to success that was firmly based on merit.
The test prep centers that tower over Kota were the brainchild of Vinod Kumar Bansal, a mechanical engineer working at a textile factory in the city. In the mid 1980s, Basal was diagnosed with a degenerative neuromuscular condition that would eventually confine him to a wheelchair. At the time, Kota was an industrial town with few job opportunities outside of a cluster of limestone quarries and fiber factories. Feeling out a potential alternate career, Bansal began helping his neighbor’s son prepare for the IIT entrance test. As years passed and his condition worsened, more boys from the neighborhood joined his tutoring sessions. In 1990, 13 of his students were accepted into IIT. Three years later, 23 students got in. In 1995, the number doubled to 49.
Bansal’s teaching style was rooted in the Kumon method, which was invented by a Japanese high school teacher named Toru Kumon in 1958 and focused on the complete mastery of a topic before moving onto a new topic. His daily practice problems, known as DPP, included a sheet of ten challenging questions sourced from textbooks across the world, as a type of “mental massage to activate idle brain cells.” “Spare no effort, work hard and live up to your potential. Whatever follows will always be for the best.” Bansal told his students. “That is the simple calculus of karma.” By the time the textile factory, the largest employer in town, shut down and left thousands of highly skilled workers jobless, Bansal was running a successful test-prep business.
One afternoon in the summer of 2000, Bansal awoke to a crowd surging at his gate, as news spread that one of his students had scored the top national rank in the engineering entrance test. The total number of acceptances from his classes were close to 300 now. When Bansal emerged from his home to address the crowd, he announced that he did not have the space to accommodate more students. “A riot-like situation prevailed and the police had to be summoned to get things under control,” Sachin Jha, an early student of Bansal’s who attended IIT-Delhi, wrote in his biography, It All Adds Up.
Over the next years, Bansal expanded his business by acquiring neighboring houses to add capacity, hired more teachers, and commissioned the construction of a tower with 120 classrooms. Across the city, new coaching institutes cropped up, started by Bansal’s factory colleagues and teaching associates. They replicated his teaching style and capitalized on the growing demand. In 2007, Bansal created a pool of roughly 2,000 teachers in training, poised to replace instructors who were either being poached by other centers or who left to start their own. Coaching centers throughout the city also began spending millions, recruiting students as early as the sixth grade. If a student was bright enough, no price was too high to persuade him to move to Kota and study under a coaching center’s banner. It could include a relocation sum, a monthly stipend, a flat, and in one case, full-time employment for the student’s father.
In the run up to exam season, which begins after Diwali in the winter and lasts until Holi in the spring, students who are expected to become toppers are locked away in high-security boarding houses and incentivized with flats, motorbikes or wads of cash to thwart poaching by rival coaching centers. Last winter, when the medical entrance test results were announced, the national topper was Mrinal Kutteri, a teenager with a halo of curly hair and a sprinkling of pimples from the southern Indian city of Hyderabad. The was just one problem: two institutes in Kota claimed credit for his success. Kutteri had received coaching in a satellite branch of the Aakash Institute and also accessed an online test-series from the Allen Career Institute. To solidify their claim, the Aakash Institute brought Kutteri to Kota to participate in a road show on the institute’s behalf. Kutteri sat in an open jeep, his face engulfed in garlands, as a wedding band with trumpets and snare drums led a procession of prancing students hoisting posters of his face.
3.
Kota’s coaching students tend to define their test-prep experience as “life-changing.” It is a place where they learn that getting a full night’s rest is a luxury. Friendships are tainted with the fear of getting attached to a competitor. Dating is seen as amoral. Watching a movie means throwing away a future. Playing a sport is a waste of time. It is a place where everyone is young but being youthful is taboo, where success is a product of merit and failure is a shortfall in hard work.
“Kota gives you the right atmosphere to study hard,” said Saurvi Kumari, a student from Bihar who was hoping to go on to study medicine. “You get out of your house for a walk and you’ll see students with their heads buried in textbooks. You stop to drink tea at the corner stall and you’ll see students solving problems. It makes you want to leave your cup half-full and run home to your books because everything other than studying can start to feel like a waste of time, but this is what motivates us to work harder.”
Saurvi had heard that there was a park with replicas of the seven wonders of the world a short distance from her boarding house. There was a horror house in the mall across her coaching institute where shop attendants dressed as ghosts. You could go boating in the Chambal River and make videos of hand shadow dances at sunset. “The day I get selected, I will stay back for a month in Kota so I can roam these places and experience everything,” she said.
On the Hindu festival of Maha Shivratri, when prayers were said to be especially potent, I accompanied Saurvi as she made her way through the corridor of a temple covered in hand-written notes from coaching students. “Please God, give me spark to do hard work and potential to study 24/7 for 3-4 years,” Saurvi read to herself as she glided from message to message. “Please make my parents happy and rich,” the next one read. “Please only one government medical seat, only one, please.” This one struck a chord, and Saurvi closed her eyes to pray, but then suddenly remembered it was time to start her evening study routine. She emptied the coins in her purse into the temple’s donation box and ran out to the street to hail a rickshaw.
Kota, in a way, never stopped being a factory town. Instead of nylon and limestone, coaching centers produce a different type of product. “There are two types of students in Kota—rankers and bankers,” Amit Gupta, a biology professor, told me. “One ranker will attract thousands of bankers. This is our modus operandi. We are in the business of selling dreams.”
By Gupta’s definition, rankers were students with the potential to get into elite colleges, and bankers, who were in the majority, were students whose capabilities did not match their ambitions. “A ranker was always going to get selected. If he gets good teachers, his rank may improve, but he was already capable of selection,” Gupta said. “The business model of the coaching industry relies on the banker. We show him a dream—‘You can also become an IITian or a doctor’— even though we know all along that he would never be selected because there are just not enough seats.
Every student who moves to Kota on some level believes the half-truth that anyone who works hard enough can make it. The relentless hours of study, taunts, missed birthdays and family gatherings, the loneliness, the sting of disappointment, the loss of friends, interests, fresh air and the experience of being young and the stigma of watching movies or playing sport eventually create a press-cooker culture that reaps a routine harvest of young lives. According to the latest National Crime Record Bureau report, a student committed suicide every 42 minutes in India. An earlier report revealed that the rate of suicide in Kota was higher than the national average, driven by students hanging themselves from ceiling fans in their boarding houses, drinking rat poison and jumping to their deaths. In 2022, 14 students committed suicide in Kota. Three of them took place on a single day, two in neighboring rooms of the same boarding house.
After every suicide, coaching institutes and boarding houses make newspapers disappear to prevent copy-cat deaths but the city sinks deeper into a grim silence.
4.
The small percentage of students who leave Kota with spots at elite colleges are increasingly graduating into an economy that may not have a place for them.
Demographically, India has the world’s largest population of young people, roughly 600 million people are under the age of 25, a demographic dividend that was expected to deliver once-in-a-lifetime economic growth. The latest report from the Center of Monitoring Indian Economy, an independent think-tank, shows that even as the working age population increased by 121 million between 2016-17 and 2021-22, the labor force shrunk by 10 million. This means that even as more people entered the working age population, fewer people from the age group entered the labor market.
Economists have long worried that India’s economic growth is uneven and driven mainly by consumption of its small upper class. A majority of the country’s young people are unemployed or unemployable, despite rising levels of education. Even as growth is raising aspirations, the economy is failing to generate jobs that allow people to fulfill those aspirations. As a result, graduates are forced to accept jobs below their qualification. A job that carried a graduate-level eligibility, for example, is performed by a post-graduate candidate. “That is great bad signal for an economy,” Bairagya said. “Because it leads to a crisis of diploma disease. Your education is becoming less valuable every day.”
The unemployment rate among graduates and postgraduates is 33%,, according to the latest State of Working in India Report by Azim Premji University’s Center For Sustainable Employment. Indian newspapers are filled with dispiriting stories of young people unable to find work. In Bihar, a railway recruitment drive was called off after three empty train coaches were set to fire to protest irregularities in the selection procedure in which 12 million people applied for 35,000 clerical jobs. In Uttar Pradesh, unemployed graduates wore their diplomas around their necks and polished shoes at a street corner to protest the lack of decent jobs. In Chhattisgarh, 225,000 people, including engineering and management graduates, applied for 657 peon jobs that required candidates with basic writing skills and the ability to ride a bicycle.
“I think we messed up by importing the Western individualist model which equates education to social advancement without deeply thinking about what 1.4 billion people are going to do,” said Vivekananda Nemana, a PhD candidate at Princeton University’s Sociology department whose research focuses on education and opportunities in India’s shifting economy. In some ways, India’s education model drew on the economic model of large families, where resources are concentrated on getting one person out so they can support the rest. For instance, a doctor or engineer who finds jobs abroad and lifts his family at home into the middle class. “We became an extreme version of a winner-takes-all economy.”
Even as India struggles to revive the economy after the pandemic, which cost the country 4.5 million jobs, Kota’s students are preoccupied with worry about their weekly tests. They worry about catching malaria or dengue and missing out on lectures. They worry about whether their hard work will pay off in the way their families hope.
Abhyudaya Raj, the son of a cement trader from Nalanda district in Bihar, moved to Kota at the age of 10 to start test-prep for an exam he would attempt five years later. “My dream is to attend IIT-Bombay,” he said. He was sitting on the edge of his bed under a flickering tubelight in a student boarding house where he had already spent four years of his childhood. He had lost touch with his friends from the village and resisted the temptation of making new ones to focus on test-prep. When asked why he wanted to attend that particular college, he was stunned, as if it was a question that had never crossed his mind. “Because I think you get good job placements there?” he looked at his feet and ventured a guess.
This past year, more than 2 million Indians appeared for the entrance tests to compete for 108,161 spots. Over 1.9 million failed, nearly all of them will try again.
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Photo captions of students in Kota:
Anshu, the third son of a government schoolteacher from the village of Bazidpur in eastern India, arrived in Kota at 15 with a bowl cut, a smattering of pimples and a soft voice that fell silent whenever his brothers were around. He wore the mud-brown shirt and khakhi dress pants of his old school uniform and carried a duffle bag containing a clean shirt, pajamas, a towel, a steel drinking glass, sachets of glucose powder and an English dictionary. "Kota is not a place," he said. "It's an emotion."
Govind Pandey is 17 and attends the Motion Education coaching center. He writes formulas on the walls of his hostel to help him prepare for his engineering entrance exam. “Surrounding myself with the material means I am manifesting results,” he says.
Orientation day at the Allen Career Institute, Kota’s largest coaching center. Allen stretches across 22 buildings in the city and employs 2,000 teachers who instruct 1.25 million students every year.
“Kota gives you the right atmosphere to study hard,” says Saurvi Kumari (top left), a student from Bihar who is hoping to go on to study medicine.
Arman Ansari came to Kota from a village in Uttar Pradesh four years ago to prepare for the medical entrance exam. After four unsuccessful attempts to pass the test, he is studying for a fifth try. “Even if I take the pressure, my family diffuses it,” he says. “They have been my support, that’s why I am still trying.”
The walls inside Radha Krishna Temple are covered with handwritten prayers from students. “Please, God, give me potential to study 24/7 for 3-5 years,” reads one note. Another student wrote: “Please make my parents happy and rich. Please only one government medical seat, only one, please.”
