Shiksha Opinion: Is Kota a sure-shot way to clear JEE?

Is Kota a sure-shot way to clear JEE?

With JEE just a week away, we are trying to demystify a topic which often catches every IIT aspirants’ mind – What is so great about Kota, the engineering coaching hub?

If we go by figures, then it is a known fact that each year this mecca of engineering coaching welcomes over a lakh students who head there to fulfill their dream of joining an IIT. What’s more, nearly 1/5th of the students who visit this small city in Rajasthan are girls.

In 2013, about 1.25 lakh students made Kota their home to make their IIT dream a reality. Every year a vast majority of students also consider taking a drop-year so as to keep their hope alive to clear the engineering entrances the subsequent year. This year, coaching institutes estimate that around 1.25-1.50 lakh students would be taking admissions into the various coaching institutes in Kota.

This got me thinking: what is so special about Kota? What is the magical something that Kota has that other cities don’t? To understand this, I tried to figure what really placed Kota at the pedestal at which it stands today.

Going by the history, in the early 1980s one engineer working with JK Synthetics factory, VK Bansal, started taking mathematics tuition classes for local students. As luck would have it, under his able guidance students started clearing entrance exams of IITs. However, Kota as a city came into the limelight in 1986 when Sanjeev Arora, a native of this town topped IIT-JEE. In 1990, 13 students coached by Prof. Bansal cracked the entrance exam, bringing him and his coaching centre into prominence.

In 1995, Kota was appraised nationally for its education standards, when around 51 students of this city cleared the IIT entrance exam. After this achievement there was no looking back. The city soon became home to many coaching institutes such as Bansal Classes, Resonance, Vibrant, Allen Career Institute, Career Point and Motion IIT JEE. However, the buck didn’t stop there.  In 2011, Etoos, a South- Korean coaching company also came to set-up shop. In fact, Chetan Bhagat’s novel Revolution 2020, wherein the main protagonist heads to Kota for IIT coaching, in its own way propagated the concept of students flocking to the city to secure a place in the prestigious IITs.

But, I also wanted to understand what makes this city click so much with students. Students revealed that Kota offers the right atmosphere to study. Always surrounded by the “most intelligent” students along with good faculty, they stay motivated to study and perform better. Having said this, I soon realised that the main reason students flock to this engineering coaching hub is the promises made by coaching institutes: “Admission at IITs is a guarantee, if you study here”. How they can guarantee such a thing, I fail to understand.

For me, it seems like an outright lie where the coaching institutes in Kota light up false hopes and makes over-the-top promises. Some students definitely have the intellect level to crack any entrance exam and they are capable of doing it with or without being coached at Kota. But then, how do you make the students understand this?

I can’t help but sympathise with the students who end up spending anywhere between Rs. 35,000 to a whooping one lakh rupees annually as coaching fee at Kota. Also, most students who land up for coaching at Kota are from states such as Bihar, U.P., Uttarakhand, M.P. and Rajasthan, so they end up spending another Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 60,000 on their boarding and lodging.

Essentially, the concept of tuitions which started off with good intensions in the early ‘80s, stressing on individual attention, has now basically become a business. Getting admission into a top coaching institute in Kota is also a task in itself because students have to sit through an eligibility test to secure a seat.

What’s more, Kota’s coaching institutes spend lakhs on their promotional and marketing campaigns and so it is not a shocking revelation when these centres end up admitting several batch-full of students during an academic year – the ulterior motive being to earn big bucks and also beat competitors.

Also, if statistics are to be believed 70 per cent of Kota’s economy thrives on revenue earned from hostel facilities, stationery shops, cyber cafes as well as photocopiers which are running only due to the huge student community living in this city.

For students, I want to say that if clearing JEE is really your dream then all you need is immense hard-work and a good guide or coaching centre to help you through the preparation process. Trust me, when I say you are not missing much if you are not getting coached at a tuition centre at Kota.

What’s more, these days there are some really good options and tutorials available online as well. Herein, students are provided with an opportunity to be coached by IIT pass-outs on different topics and concepts, while they get to stay in the comfort of their own home.

All said and done, I come back to the basic question:  Is engineering still the first preference of students or do they take such a step (to go to Kota for coaching) primarily because of societal/peer pressure? I feel that as of today Kota and similar coaching hubs propagate the “artificially elitist” concept and we as a society need to break this to save students of the pressure to put up with such hype.

I am not saying that all Kota coaching centres are incompetent. I am simply saying that they are hyped. There are good coaching options available in other cities as well. If you have it in you no force in this world can stop you from achieving your goal. With this, I close this article by wishing all the JEE aspirants – All the best for their upcoming exam!

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