India’s deadly coaching centres
The drowning of three students earlier this week has reignited the debate over such facilities. Young people from all over India are crammed into overcrowded classrooms and student residences and find themselves studying up to 18 hours a day to pass a government or college entrance exam. The costs fall on families while students feel all the pressure. The government has been forced to intervene because of a high number of suicides in recent years.
New Delhi (AsiaNews) – The death of three Indian students at an exam coaching centre due to a flood has reignited the debate about such facilities, which are increasingly popular even though students’ safety and health (including mental health) often take a back seat.
Shreya Yadav, Tanya Soni, and Nevin Dalvin were in the basement of the Rau’s IAS Study Circle in central Delhi's Old Rajinder Nagar area to prepare for India's Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exams.
The two women and one man, from Uttar Pradesh, Telangana, and Kerala respectively, had told families about previous flooding incidents, a problem the institute failed to resolve.
Aware of the many problems associated with private coaching centres, which have been allowed to multiply unregulated, the Indian government at the start of this year issued guidelines requiring such coaching centres to register, impose fair fees, comply with basic safety regulations, and ban students under the age of 16.
The Ministry of Education decided to intervene following a series of fatal accidents and suicides among students, which exposed the harsh reality of coaching centres, even requiring the installation of “suicide proofed” fans because some students had taken their own lives by hanging themselves from fans.
The best known training centres are in Kota, Rajasthan, where students prepare to pass university entrance exams, including the one for medicine, and one for the 23 prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT).
The admission ratio for the IIT entrance exam is 50 to 1 or even 100 to 1. Out of a million candidates, only 10,000 pass the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE).
The exam is highly competitive. This year, 12 suicides were reported among students at the more than 300 centres in Kota, while last year they numbered 26, the highest ever recorded.
It is estimated that every year 200,000 students from all over India come to Kota, a place that has become famous after Vinod Kumar Bansal, an engineer, began to tutor some students at his home after he could no longer work due to illness.
As many of his students later ended up at an IIT, which has now become synonymous with wealth and success, Bansal became a celebrity and later others copied his model, generating a new market that is now worth US$ 500 million.
Once it was realised that it was a profitable business, coaching centres began to invest in marketing and advertising to attract secondary school students.
Since the results of public school students in rural areas tend to be very poor, many families choose to invest very early in private lessons, often by contracting debts.
Once they arrive at the coaching centres, whether to get into university or get a public sector job (stable, well-paid, with social security), students feel pressured because they do not want to disappoint their family. Stress and isolation do not help either.
“The young students have an emotional response to situations as their prefrontal cortex is not yet fully developed," explained psychotherapist Swati Bajpai. “They feel a guilt that they have let their family down and also that this failure is the end of the road for them.”
Life inside these centres is very hard. Residents study up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week, and live alone in overcrowded student residences. And every 15 days they have to submit to assessments to test their knowledge level.
Two studies found that most suicides occurred around the time exam results are announced, and that the students who take their own lives tend to come from poor families.
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