THE NEW KOTAS OF INDIA

The craze for engineering is fading in the metros, but in smalltown India, it remains the only thing to aspire to. And so in places like Ranchi, Madurai and Patna, coaching is now a booming business — even though only about 1% of aspirants ever make it i

f you’re not an engineer, you’re nothing,” says Kunal Jha, 17. The Class 11 student from Ranchi has been preparing for the engineering Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) for the last three years and still has one year to go before he attempts the threehour test that will determine his future.

Jha signed up with Shastri Tutorials, a local coaching centre that offered a fouryear package to prepare him for Class 12, and the main and advanced JEE exams. It includes lectures, homework, an unending series of mock exams and gamified quizzes. Jha’s dream is to score well enough on the JEE to be among the 0.9% applicants who get accepted at one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), and eventually become an engineer. He likes painting too, and has always been impressed by depictions of swanky big-city art galleries in films. “But I don’t want to disappoint my father,” he says. “Also, don’t engineers get better wives?”

While big-city students now dream of careers in sports management, fashion merchandising and social-media marketing, in India’s smaller towns, engineering is as revered as it’s always been, with one major change. Coaching centres are mushrooming closer to home, roping in kids as young as 13, four years before they even pick PCM (physics, chemistry, mathematics) in college, to angle for an IIT seat two years after that.

In Ranchi, the number of coaching centres has shot up from 200 in 2012 to about 10,000 this year, according to the Jharkhand Coaching Association. In Nagpur, the number has risen from 110 in 2008 to 5,000, estimates the Maharashtra Class Owners Association. Bhubaneswar, Patna and Madurai have seen spikes too.

“Parents in small towns are anxious,” says Avijit Pathak, a professor at Centre for Study of Social Systems at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. “They don’t think school teaching can prepare their kids to get into an IIT.”

For students like Jha, the centres offer guidance that was never available locally and this early in one’s education. “They teach us to think like a JEE aspirant, we learn all the formulae when we’re young,” he says. He, like lakhs of others across small towns, hopes the early-mover advantage gives him a better shot at the engineering dream. Many experts wonder if the effort is worth it. Panini Telang, secretary of the Association of Coaching Institutes India, says coaching classes started flourishing after the IT boom in the mid-2000s. “Families, especially from small towns realised these were good opportunities and wanted their children to become engineers,” she says.

In the first few years, small-town kids would have to leave home to study in bigger cities like Indore and Kota, where the centres first sprung up.

Often parents and families moved with them, living in rented homes for a shot at the dream. Within a decade, centres started branching out to the small towns, making the dream more accessible than ever before.

The business plans were adapted too – package deals start as early as Class 6, though the most popular ones start from Class 8, and cost upwards of Rs 4 lakh. Banners cover entire streets and local airwaves, there are lower EMIs, and repeater batches if you failed the JEE (Main) in the first of three permitted attempts.

In 2013, when the Kota-based coaching centre, Allen, launched a Chandigarh chapter, the first batch had 13 students. “The current batch has 7,000,” says Pushkar Rai, the centre head in Chandigarh. “We have students coming from Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Assam. This centre is closer, payingguest facilities are plenty, and the climate is similar to that of their hometowns.”

Gopal Pathak, vice chancellor at Jharkhand Institute of Technology, Ranchi, says coaching classes thrive because “they claim to give you so-called success mantras and an urge to become a topper. This takes away the beauty of learning concepts and their applications.”

Also, not everyone tops exams or gets into an IIT. Data from the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) shows that 11.86 lakh students appeared for the JEE (Main) last exam last year. Of these, 2.21 lakh did well enough to qualify for the JEE (Advanced) and 10,899 got enrolled across 22 IITs and the Indian School of Mines (ISM) Dhanbad.

That’s a success rate of less than 1%. But in cities with fewer routes to success than those in bigger cities, it’s worth the expensive, four-year struggle. Sharma from IITDelhi says that if private coaching can increase your chances to get into an IIT by 5%, parents consider it a good enough deal.

JEE (Main) scores are also accepted as an admission criteria across other university-affiliated engineering colleges. “So even if students do not qualify for IIT, they will be capable of getting into a good engineering college,” says Vivek Sharma, managing director of the Maharashtra Class Owners Association. It’s a tall claim. For the 99% of students who find themselves locked out of the IIT gates after the JEE exam, the struggle is often worse. “Several of them lose hope after underperforming at the entrance exam and switch to Commerce,” says Vikas Kumar, a career counsellor associated with bigger coaching centres in Ranchi. “Others finish their engineering degree from smaller colleges but struggle to find good jobs. There aren’t many options in smaller cities.”

Nishit Devang, 23, completed his BTech in 2016 from Sai Nath University in Ranchi. He now works at a BPO in Gurugram. “I left no stone unturned,” he says. “I put in 100% to get into an IIT, attended a coaching class for six hours a day every day.”

He didn’t make the cut but still wanted be an engineer, so he opted for a local university. “Despite good grades, I did not get a job in my field. I now think maybe I should not have been a part of this rat race at all... maybe I should have taken up Arts, towards which I was always inclined.”

Like Devang, thousands of BTech-degree holders in India have struggled to find jobs. Data from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) suggests that only 35% of students enrolled in the colleges of their choice got jobs in the field last year. And given that so many engineering aspirants simply give up on the field if they don’t secure an IIT seat, it’s not surprising that AICTE also records that 47% of seats at engineering colleges went vacant last year.

At the IITs, students from small-town centres who do make it, struggle in a different way. “We are seeing more students coming from smaller cities,” says Anurag Sharma, dean of student affairs at IITDelhi. “There can be two reasons: wellknown coaching centres have penetrated here and are training lakhs of students to crack the JEE; and students from bigger cities are abandoning the IIT route to study abroad, where admission into a good institute is easier.”

This leaves professors with a new challenge: how to teach students the funda-

mentals of engineering and encourage research-based knowledge when all they’ve learned for five years is how to crack an entrance exam.

“Sometimes students can’t cope with the teaching methods at IITs, which do not involve spoon-feeding you the mathematical formulae,” says Sharma.

Some of the repercussions are already being felt across business and industry. A 2017 report by Head Hunters India, an executive search firm, says that IT companies will lay off 1.75 lakh to 2 lakh employees annually due to their under-preparedness for adapting to newer technologies. Another report by management consultancy McKinsey & Co said nearly half the workforce in IT services firms will be ‘irrelevant’ over the next three years.

“The engineering dream still persists,” says Pathak. “A young student who might have become a good historian is now an IT professional; one who could have been a theoretical physician works at a call centre. This is tragic. It’s our collective failure. We need a truly innovative culture of schooling that taps the uniqueness of each child rather than standardised life projects. We need to educate the parents.”

Some students underperform in the JEE, give up and switch to Commerce. Others get a degree in engineering from a smaller college and struggle to find good jobs.

VIKAS KUMAR, career counsellor A STUDENT’S VIEW