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.
Text by Mansi ChoksiPhotographs by
Zishaan A Latif
Every summer in northwest India, as hot winds sweep
up from the deserts of Rajasthan, trains packed with students from the
countryside trundle into Kota, a small city dense with clusters of test-prep
centers. All told, roughly 150,000 students arrive every year — some of them
children of fruit vendors, farmhands, welders, freight-truck drivers,
construction workers, sweepers and rickshaw-pullers from the poorest corners of
the country — hoping to improve their chances on the nation’s highly
competitive college entrance exams. In a society rife with corruption, where
bribes routinely ensure advancement in both the public and private sectors,
attending an elite college is one of the most reliable merit-based routes to
success. National entrance tests are used to rank students applying to colleges
across the country, and families take on lifelong debt for test-prep courses,
hoping their children will gain admission to universities that guarantee a
career as a doctor or an engineer.
Kota
is a place for strivers, where the fear of being left behind is palpable. Two
of the city’s main neighborhoods — Vigyan Nagar and Landmark City — feel like
open-air museums of Indian anxiety. Their narrow lanes are crammed with student
boardinghouses, private tutors and restaurants offering home-style tiffin
services. A corner store sells 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.”
Image
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. Credit...Zishaan A Latif for The New York Times
In
many ways, Kota is a reflection of the culture of inequality that persists
across Indian society. This past year, 2.74 million Indians sat for engineering
and medical entrance exams, competing for 64,610 spots. More than 2.6 million
failed. Of the students who arrive in Kota every year, only a small percentage
are accepted to elite colleges. Known as “toppers,” they are seen as symbols of
how grit and dedication can pay off. Everywhere you turn in Kota, the faces of
toppers look down on you from billboards advertising the coaching center that
tutored them. The many who fail repeat prep courses and retake tests multiple
times until they can’t afford to keep trying. Some drop out and return to their
villages to find temp work. Some get into lesser-known colleges, graduates of
which often earn a fraction of what elite-college graduates can make. Some,
mostly women, drop out of the work force altogether.
A student’s room at Crianza, a private hostel. Roughly 150,000
students from across the country move to Kota every year to focus on test
prep. Credit...Zishaan A Latif for The
New York Times
Despite these grim odds, young Indians continue arriving in
Kota, and the coaching institutes have become a big business, encompassing 300
or so centers that generate $350 million to $450 million in revenue every year,
according to one estimate. The largest coaching company, the Allen Career
Institute, instructs more than one million students.
The industry began as the brainchild of Vinod Kumar
Bansal, a mechanical engineer who worked at a city textile factory. In 1974,
Bansal 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 quarries and
synthetic-fiber factories. Searching for an alternate career, Bansal began
tutoring high school students, and in 1985 helped his neighbors’ daughter pass
the engineering entrance exam — she later attended the prestigious Indian Institute
of Technology. Over time, more kids from the neighborhood joined his tutoring
sessions. In 1990, 13 of his students were accepted into I.I.T. Three years
later, 23 students got in. In 1995, the number climbed to 49, according to the
book “It All Adds Up,” by Sachin Jha, an early student.
Bansal’s
teaching style was rooted in the Kumon method, which was invented by a Japanese
high school teacher named Toru Kumon in the 1950s. It was predicated on
mastering one topic before moving onto the next. Bansal’s daily practice
problems included a sheet of 10 challenging questions sourced from textbooks
across the world, which he regarded as a type of “mental massage.” “Spare no
effort, work hard and live up to your potential,” Bansal would tell his
students. “Whatever follows will always be for the best. That is the simple
calculus of karma.” By the time the textile factory, the largest employer in
town, shut down and left thousands of skilled workers jobless, Bansal was
running a successful test-prep business.
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. Credit...Zishaan A Latif for The
New York Times
One
afternoon in the summer of 2000, Bansal awoke to a crowd surging at the gate to
his house. News had spread quickly that one of his students had earned the top
score on the engineering entrance test. The total number of acceptances to
elite colleges from his classes was now close to 300. When Bansal emerged to
address the crowd, he announced that he could not accommodate more students. “A
riotlike situation prevailed, and the police had to be summoned to get things
under control,” Jha wrote.
Over the years, Bansal expanded his business,
acquiring neighboring houses to increase capacity, hiring more teachers and
eventually constructing a tower with 120 classrooms. Across the city, new
coaching institutes, started by Bansal’s factory colleagues and teaching
associates, cropped up. They mimicked his teaching style in an attempt to
capitalize on the growing demand. So many instructors were being poached or
leaving to start their own centers that Bansal created a reserve of roughly 200
teachers and trainees. Coaching centers throughout the city also began spending
millions on marketing, recruiting students as early as sixth grade. If a
student was bright enough, there was no limit to what a coaching center would
do to persuade him or her to move to Kota and study under its banner.
Incentives could include a relocation sum, a monthly stipend, a bedroom and, in
at least one case, full-time employment for the student’s father. The largess
was strategic — one topper could attract thousands who would enroll in the hope
of becoming just like them.
In
the run-up to exam season, which begins in spring and lasts through summer,
prospective toppers are locked away in boardinghouses and offered apartments,
motorbikes or wads of cash to thwart poaching by rival coaching centers. Last
September, when the medical entrance-exam results were announced, one of the
national toppers was Mrinal Kutteri, a teenager with a halo of curly hair from
Hyderabad, a city in southern India. There was just one problem: Two different
institutes in Kota claimed credit for his success. Kutteri had received
coaching in a satellite branch of the Aakash Institute but had also accessed an
online test series from the Allen Career Institute. To solidify its claim, the
Aakash Institute brought Kutteri to Kota to participate in a victory parade on
the institute’s behalf. Kutteri stood in an open jeep, his neck swaddled in
garlands, as a wedding band with trumpets and snare drums led a procession of
prancing students hoisting posters of his face.
“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.
“There are two types of students in Kota — rankers and bankers,”
Amit Gupta, a coaching-center biology instructor, 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 are students with
the potential to get into elite colleges, while bankers, who are in the majority,
are students whose ambitions outrank their capacities. “A ranker was always
going to get selected,” Gupta told me. “If he gets good teachers, his rank may
improve, but he was already capable of selection. The business model of the
coaching industry relies on the banker. We show him a dream — ‘You can also
become an I.I.T.-ian or a doctor’ — even though we know all along that he would
never be selected because there are just not enough seats.”
Yet every student who moves to Kota believes, on
some level, that anyone who works hard enough can make it. “Kota gives you the
right atmosphere to study hard,” Saurvi Kumari, a student from Bihar who was
hoping to go on to study medicine, told me. “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.”
Kumari
had heard that there was an amusement park with replicas of famous monuments
from around the world in the center of the city. There was a house of horrors
in a nearby mall where shop attendants dressed as ghosts. You could go boating
on the Chambal River and make videos of hand-shadow dances at sunset. “The day
I get selected for admission, I will treat myself to these places,” she said.
Anjali a student of Crianza Hostel , seen studying in Pic
