Retiring rooms at railway stations in India are an undiscovered comfort. For people used to hotels, the retiring room can be an abomination; the railways’ legacy of carrying millions of people and the associated reputation of a lack of hygiene precedes it. But these retiring rooms are a well-kept secret; they are very well maintained, with clean sheets and clean bathrooms and are available at a fraction of the price of a hotel.
Most of these retiring rooms are on the first floor of the railway station, the staircase to it mostly lies in plain sight, but the millions of passengers passing by it every day tend to ignore it, their next destination beckoning. But when you stay on the first floor of a railway station, you can stand on the balcony overlooking the entrance and watch the hundreds and thousands of people enter and exit, each caught up in their own agendas, most in a hurry, some lost.
The view from the retiring room in Kota, Rajasthan, was sprawling; the station had a huge entrance flanked by banners containing photos of teenagers who had cracked the notoriously difficult IIT-JEE or NEET, entrance exams to the country’s premier higher education institutes, and the institute that helped them crack it.
Every morning, I stood on the balcony with a cup of instant coffee and watched students and parents frantically enter and exit the station. It was something I enjoyed doing. I had once undergone the pressure of writing these exams myself, and now I could watch them from my ivory tower, observing and understanding, invisible to the people below me. Once you reach the platforms, you can hear the public announcement system blaring the names of multiple coaching institutions along with the area of the city they are located in. There are small TV screens that indicate the coach number on the platform and they also repeatedly play advertisements of coaching centres. Not for nothing is Kota considered the coaching capital of India. One of the largest coaching centres in Kota even broke the Guinness world record for “the most number of students enrolled in one institution in one city”, with a staggering 1.25 lakh enrolments in its Kota centre alone. It can be extrapolated that around 2,50,000 students aged between 15 to 18 live in Kota year after year, preparing for multiple entrance exams, including the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE), though there is no official data or any form of regulation yet covering such a large interest group. Given that the total population of the town is about 1.5 million, this statistic is significant indeed.
Every year around 1.1 to 1.3 million students write the fiercely competitive entrance exam to India’s premier technology institutes – the IITs. This exam and the institutes themselves have been subjects of much praise, prestige, criticism and research over the last few decades. There are 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) in India today. The seven older ones are IIT Bombay, Madras, Kharagpur, Kanpur, Roorkee, Guwahati and Delhi, which are the institutes of choice for every candidate. Roughly 17,000 seats are available every year within the IITs for the one million students whose dreams, efforts and sacrifices are put to the test through the JEE.
Today, the JEE comprises two parts. The JEE Mains is the qualifying exam that every student writes and whose score is also considered for admission to multiple other engineering institutes across India. From the 1.5 million, 1,00,000 to 2,00,000 students qualify for the JEE-Advanced, from which the top 17,000 get admission to the IITs. Over the years, many of these candidates have come from one of the many coaching institutes in Kota. It is estimated that the coaching centres alone make a turnover of around more than Rs 1500 crore every year.6 The town of Kota has come to signify coaching. Banners announcing a particular institute’s performance in the JEE, large mugshots of JEE toppers and announcements of entrance tests to enter these coaching institutes adorned not just the train platforms but also on hoardings on highways and roads inside the city.
I exited the station and asked for directions to a bus stand that would take me to the coaching centres. I was told to go to Mahaveer Nagar, for that’s where the “big institutes” were. A cloud of dust welcomed me as I got off a rickety bus at Mahaveer Nagar in Kota, right in the middle of the road.
On either side of the road stood massive buildings, going up to what looked like at least twenty to thirty floors. A large mall came into view in the distance as the cloud of dust settled. I kept walking, a little apprehensive of navigating such wide roads and large buildings on foot. Unsure of what it was until I came to its entrance, I walked past one large complex that turned out to be the campus of one of the more prominent IIT-JEE coaching institutes in Kota. A coaching institute with a campus!
On the road adjacent to this behemoth of a building was a group of auto drivers, continuously beckoning me to take a ride with them. The complex in itself stood unassumingly, its facade wholly covered in glass, with some brown tiles for accent. Anyone unfamiliar with Kota and its legacy could have easily mistaken it for an office of a large multinational corporation.
It was clear that the economy of Kota depended a great deal on these coaching centres. Everyone in Kota, it seemed, had a stake in the coaching centres, small or big. The road adjacent to the massive complex had small tin shacks selling stationery and notebooks. A closer look at the shacks revealed that they were selling huge spiral-bound notebooks for students to practice their math, physics and chemistry problems. A little further down stood what I would call a giant bazaar catering to students’ needs. There were stores offering to print out online forms for a rupee, mobile phone shops offering prepaid/postpaid recharges, tempered glasses to protect screens, wireless earphones and the like. Just a little beyond these shops were more stationery stores that stood next to each other jostling for the tiny space that was available. The road I had got off on was wide and flanked by large buildings with massive boundary walls. But these smaller arterial roads were a beehive of activity. The only adults on these roads were shop owners or shop helpers. The street was full of teenagers, many young boys sporting the beginnings of a moustache, walking purposefully to their destination – maybe to their next class or back to their accommodation to prepare for a test later in the evening.
Excerpted with permission from The Smart and the Dumb: The Politics of Education in India, Vishal Vasanthakumar, Penguin India.
