Kota’s Clockwork: Where Childhood Is Timed
At four in the morning, the hostel corridors of Kota hum with the faint rustle of pages. A thousand alarm clocks go off almost together, slicing through the silence like drill calls in an army camp. In one of those rooms, a seventeen-year-old boy sits on his bed, eyelids heavy, hands trembling around a cup of instant coffee. On the wall, a poster reads: “Dream it. Crack it. Live it.” Beneath that slogan, his calendar is filled with countdowns, test dates, mock exams, and the long red line that marks “IIT-JEE 2026.” For him, time itself has become a syllabus.
Across the narrow lane, another building mirrors his schedule, the same neon lights, the same slogans, the same rhythm of waking, studying, eating, sleeping. What was once a town is now a system; what were once students are now candidates in uniform. The coaching centre owns the morning; the institute owns the night. Childhood, that brief, wandering season meant for play and mistakes, has been regimented into measurable hours. It is no longer lived; it is timed.
Here, in these fluorescent rooms, the soul of Indian education reveals a quiet contradiction. Knowledge was supposed to liberate; instead, it has been industrialised. The coaching industry does not sell education; it sells assurance. It promises the parents of India that uncertainty can be conquered with fees and formulae. The irony is profound: the more we try to buy certainty, the more fragile our children become.
When news of a student suicide surfaces, another young life surrendered to the unbearable arithmetic of performance, the city mourns briefly and then resumes the timetable. Teachers promise tighter supervision; authorities promise inquiry; parents pray that their own child survives the season. The pattern repeats like a tragic chorus. These are not isolated failures of resilience; they are signs of a culture that measures worth through ranks and roll numbers.
Kota is not merely a place; it is a parable of modern India’s obsession with results. From small towns in Bihar to metros like Delhi and Hyderabad, coaching centres rise as temples of aspiration. Their walls are painted with success stories that smile from hoardings, but the foundations are built upon invisible pressure. The real question, then, is not how many succeed, but what kind of nation we are becoming when success itself needs a factory.
From Gurukul to Gig: The Making of India’s Coaching Economy
Education in India was once an intimate act, a relationship between the guru and the shishya, a slow transmission of wisdom shaped by trust and time. The old gurukul system was less about competition and more about cultivation, where learning was not merely the means to a profession but the path to self-knowledge. Yet as centuries turned and economies shifted, this sacred rhythm of learning gave way to the pulse of productivity. The modern age did not just reform education; it industrialized it.
The seeds of India’s coaching economy were sown in the soil of scarcity. In the 1980s and 1990s, the gates to prestigious institutions like the IITs and AIIMS opened only to a few hundred out of millions who dreamed. The competition was fierce, and public education, underfunded and uneven, could not prepare everyone equally. Into this gap stepped the private tutor first as a neighbourhood helper, then as a professional instructor, and soon as an entrepreneur. By the late 1990s, small tuition classes had evolved into coaching empires. The streets of Kota, Hyderabad, Patna, and Delhi began to mirror one another, lined with hostels, test series shops, and billboards promising a “sure path to success.”
What began as a supplement to learning slowly became its substitute. When schools could no longer guarantee results, coaching centres became the alternative system, parallel, powerful, and profit-driven. In a society where education is the single ladder of mobility, parents started to see these centres not as optional, but essential. It was a quiet revolution, fuelled not by policy but by desperation. In 2001, the Indian coaching market was estimated at just over ₹10,000 crores; by 2024, reports valued it at ₹55,000 crores (USD 6.5 billion), with projections to nearly triple by 2033. Behind these numbers lies a silent migration of millions of young people leaving their hometowns for “coaching cities” where learning has an entry fee and success is measured in percentile.
Kota became the symbol of the Mecca of meritocracy and the mirror of inequality. By 2024, nearly 250,000 students lived in its hostels, spending years chasing the same dream under the same schedules. The town’s economy thrives on their pursuit: stationery shops, landlords, food vendors, and test-series publishers all orbit around the coaching industry’s gravitational pull. Yet beneath this prosperity lies an ethical question when education itself becomes an economy, who ensures that learning still serves life, not the ledger?
The transformation from gurukul to gig-economy has been silent but total. Teachers became trainers; knowledge became a service; wisdom became a subscription. The market celebrates this as efficiency, but the human soul feels the absence of curiosity, of leisure, of the unpressured joy of learning. What once connected minds now connects wallets. India, the land that once taught the world the philosophy of learning, now teaches its children the economics of competing.
And yet, behind every coaching brochure, one can still hear the whisper of that older promise that learning should lead to liberation, not exhaustion. It is that whisper we must listen to before the noise of commerce drowns it entirely.
Promises for a Price
The glitter of India’s coaching empire is built on a single promise that success can be purchased. Across the nation, hoardings rise like monuments of hope: smiling toppers, airbrushed faces, slogans proclaiming “Rank 1 from our batch again!” The message is clear: if you pay the price, your child will ascend. Yet behind this billboard brightness hides a quiet deceit, one that trades in both money and faith.
In the front offices of the biggest coaching brands, success is meticulously manufactured. Students who achieve high ranks are often recruited midway through their preparation from other institutes, their victories retroactively claimed in advertisements. “Topper from our classroom program,” the posters say, but the fine print, if it exists, tells another story. Investigations by education journalists have revealed that many institutes inflate their success rates by counting even short-term course attendees as alumni. The business thrives on the illusion of certainty on selling “guaranteed results” in a universe where outcomes are never guaranteed.
For families, the investment is staggering. A two-year engineering or medical coaching program in Kota or Delhi can cost between ₹2 and ₹5 lakhs, excluding hostel, food, travel, and test material. For middle-class parents, this is not an expenditure; it is a sacrifice. Many borrow, mortgage, or liquidate savings, driven by the fear that a single missed opportunity might condemn their child to mediocrity. The Indian dream of upward mobility has, in many households, been outsourced to the coaching classroom. What was once an act of love, investing in education, has become an act of anxiety.
The profit logic is ruthless. Students who fail to perform are quietly discarded from promotional materials; those who shine are glorified as living proof of the method. Teachers, many underpaid and overburdened, face quotas to produce “success stories.” In some cases, leaked internal memos reveal coaching heads demanding that tutors “retain top scorers by personal persuasion,” a corporate phrase for emotional manipulation. Education here becomes not mentorship, but management.
And then, there are the losses with no ledger records. In 2023, The Diplomat reported that 24 students in Kota had taken their own lives by August, following a pattern eerily consistent with previous years. Psychologists working with local NGOs describe the same recurring symptom: exhaustion, isolation, and fear of failure disguised as ambition. “They are not lazy,” one counsellor said, “they are lonely.” The Rajasthan government has since mandated spring-loaded fans and wellness cells, but these are repairs, not remedies. When a culture equates a child’s worth with a rank, suicide is not an anomaly; it is an outcome.
Even the courts have begun to notice. In May 2025, the Supreme Court of India, while hearing a public interest petition, directed the Union Government to explain whether coaching centres are registered and whether FIRs were filed over student suicides. The bench observed, “Education cannot become a pressure cooker of dreams.” Yet despite such statements, the machinery rolls on. The industry remains largely unregulated, its ethics outsourced to advertisements and its accountability to grief-stricken parents.
The real tragedy is not only the loss of young lives but the loss of meaning. Education was once imagined as a bridge from ignorance to enlightenment. In the coaching economy, it has become a transaction, a toll gate on the highway to survival. We have created a world where children learn not for love of learning, but for fear of falling. And when fear becomes the teacher, what kind of citizens will our classrooms produce?
The Classroom and the Commons
In the narrow streets of India’s coaching hubs, education no longer feels like a right; it feels like a privilege earned through currency. The coaching classroom is not a public space; it is a gated economy where access is filtered by affordability. For every student sitting under the neon lights of a Kota lecture hall, there are hundreds outside in broken government schools, in rural towns, in homes where internet data packs are rationed like food. What was once a collective journey toward knowledge has fractured into two Indias: one learning for survival, the other left to survive without learning.
Public education, once envisioned as the commons of democracy, has quietly decayed under the shadow of privatization. Teachers in many government schools report dwindling attendance as students flee to private tutors or coaching centres. The very system meant to equalize opportunity is being emptied from within. In Delhi, researchers from the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration noted that nearly 70% of Class 11–12 students in urban areas now depend primarily on coaching, while many schools have become mere examination formality centres. This flight from schools to private centres does not just shift the site of learning, it shifts the soul of education itself.
The impact is deeply gendered. For girls from smaller towns, the dream of joining a coaching centre often collides with family restrictions and safety fears. The residential coaching cities are designed primarily for boys; even in Kota, fewer than 15% of hostel accommodations are reserved for female students. The infrastructure of ambition is male-centric, its marketing, its guardianship, its geography. A boy’s failure in the coaching system is seen as an investment loss; a girl’s ambition to enter it is often seen as defiance. And yet, the quiet resistance of those who still try walking miles to local coaching rooms, studying under candlelight, battling both patriarchy and poverty, remains one of the few redemptive stories in this otherwise dark industry.
Class divides cut even deeper. In Patna, Lucknow, and Hyderabad, a new phenomenon has emerged: micro-coaching centres that mimic the big brands but charge half the price. Inside them, underpaid tutors teach fifty students in rooms built for twenty. The air is thick, the fans broken, the hope relentless. These are not institutions; they are survival units. Yet their existence reveals something profound: India’s poorest are not rejecting education; they are being priced out of its promise. The coaching economy preys on aspiration but rarely delivers emancipation.
And amid all this, teachers, the moral spine of any learning community, are becoming the most alienated. The art of teaching, once nurtured through patience and empathy, has been replaced by PowerPoint slides and algorithmic efficiency. Some are instructed to repeat exact phrases for “maximum motivation,” as if students were consumers of inspiration. In Kota, a senior physics instructor once confessed to The Indian Express, “I earn well, but I no longer teach. I perform.” The classroom has turned into a theatre; students clap, record, and recite, but rarely think.
At its core, the coaching industry has not just transformed education; it has transformed how society defines worth. Marks have become the new caste. Rank has replaced respect. The distance between a government school child and a coaching graduate is no longer academic; it is existential. The commons have been captured, and the classroom, which once mirrored the nation’s diversity, now mirrors its hierarchy.
The cost, therefore, is not only in suicides or money, it is in the slow erosion of public faith. A country that once took pride in the idea of universal education now measures genius by the ability to afford preparation. The tragedy is quiet but immense: India is producing toppers faster than thinkers, and workers faster than citizens.
The Silent Casualties: Mental Health and the Machine
Every success story the coaching industry flaunts stands upon the unspoken exhaustion of thousands who collapse midway, not from failure, but from fatigue. Beneath the billboards that flash toppers’ smiles in Kota, Hyderabad, or Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar, there lies another city, one built of whispers, hospital beds, and unfinished notebooks. This is the unseen India of pressure and panic, where ambition becomes an illness, and silence, a daily discipline.
In 2023 alone, 29 students in Kota died by suicide, according to official police reports, the highest ever in a single year. Experts at the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) estimate that one student in India takes their own life every hour. Most are between 15 and 24 years old, their deaths categorized coldly as “academic stress.” Yet what they endure is not merely academic — it is a psychological and moral storm. Every morning begins with a test; every evening ends with comparison. Parents, often unaware of the inner collapse, mistake exhaustion for laziness. Teachers are trained to identify potential, not pain.
Inside a typical coaching hostel, the rhythm of life is mechanical: wake at 5 a.m., attend six hours of lectures, two of tests, and another four of “self-study.” Students eat from tiffins delivered like factory meals, and their conversations revolve entirely around marks, ranks, and doubts. The walls are covered with motivational quotes, “Never give up,” “Pain is temporary, glory is forever,” but rarely with reminders of rest or joy. In many hostels, cameras monitor study hours, and phones are confiscated to prevent distraction. The result is a psychological suffocation wrapped in the language of discipline.
Psychiatrists in Kota and Delhi report a rising tide of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, depression, and sleep deprivation among coaching students. Dr. Rakesh Pandey of AIIMS Delhi notes that “coaching stress is now a recognized social epidemic.” The Indian Journal of Psychiatry (2022) found that nearly 62% of competitive exam aspirants experience symptoms of clinical anxiety or depression, yet only 8% seek professional help due to stigma or lack of access. The tragedy deepens when institutions dismiss such cases as “lack of resilience,” reinforcing a culture where vulnerability is taboo.
The media occasionally reports these suicides, but even tragedy is commercialized. After each death, coaching institutes release condolence ads emphasizing how “mental health awareness” sessions will be held, but these are often brief, symbolic, and forgotten by the next admission cycle. The political response is equally muted. The Rajasthan government’s 2023 guidelines asked institutes to give one day off per week, limit class hours, and conduct mental health workshops, but compliance remains voluntary. The machine continues to run because the nation demands its output: toppers, engineers, doctors, the manufactured dreams of middle-class salvation.
However, the mental toll of coaching is not limited to students. Parents, too, live in a parallel anxiety, driven by the fear of their child “wasting a year.” Many take loans to fund these programs; annual fees often exceed ₹2.5–3 lakh, excluding rent and food, pushing families into debt. When the result fails to match the sacrifice, guilt eats both sides. The mother who sold jewellery for tuition, the father who left farming to accompany his son to Kota, the sibling who stayed behind, they all became silent casualties of an economy that equates worth with rank.
The deeper question, then, is not why some students die, but how the system kills dreams long before death. When education loses empathy, learning becomes trauma. When results replace reflection, intellect becomes imitation. The human mind is not a circuit board; it cannot be programmed indefinitely without burnout. Yet the coaching economy runs precisely on this delusion: that human potential is infinite, provided it pays.
The paradox of India’s educational ambition is that the same nation that worships the goddess Saraswati has allowed learning to become a battlefield where children are soldiers. Their trophies are ranks; their casualties, invisible. Until mental health is treated as integral to education, not as its afterthought, India’s knowledge revolution will remain haunted by its own victims.
Global Mirrors: Lessons from Other Nations
Every civilization faces a test of how it educates its young, not just how well they memorize, but how fully they live. The crisis of India’s coaching culture finds both reflection and contrast across the world. When we look beyond our borders, we see that nations, too, once trapped in test-centric madness, have begun to reform, realizing that intellectual excellence without emotional well-being is a hollow triumph.
In Finland, the classroom breathes differently. There are no private tuitions, no national exams until the end of high school, and no league tables ranking schools. Teachers there are not performers but guides, chosen from the top 10% of university graduates and trusted with autonomy. Children spend fewer hours in class but more in discussion, play, and reflection. The Finnish model, often cited as the world’s most humane education system, was not built overnight; it was born out of moral clarity. In the 1970s, when inequality deepened, Finland decided that education would not be a marketplace. Coaching centres were banned, and teaching was made one of the most respected professions. Today, the result is not just high literacy, but low anxiety and high life satisfaction. Their success proves that excellence and empathy can coexist.
Across the ocean, Japan once resembled India’s current path. In the 1980s, the juku or “cram school” culture dominated youth life. Competition was ferocious; children as young as ten attended after-school coaching until midnight. The pressure bred what Japanese psychologists called examination hell (shiken jigoku). When student suicides rose alarmingly in the 1990s, Japan launched sweeping reforms: reducing homework, banning late-night coaching for younger children, and promoting yutori kyoiku — “education with breathing space.” Today, though some juku still exist, the obsession has softened. The Japanese learned that national pride cannot rest on the broken minds of its youth.
South Korea, however, offers a sobering mirror, a warning of what India risks becoming. Seoul’s hagwon (private coaching institutes) operate till 2 a.m., and the country’s suicide rate among students remains one of the highest in the developed world. The government has repeatedly tried to curb coaching hours, even sending police to enforce 10 p.m. curfews, yet parental pressure keeps the cycle alive. Despite its global reputation for high scores, South Korea now faces a generational crisis of depression and burnout. Many Korean thinkers call it “the nation that forgot to dream.” It stands as a stark reminder that a society obsessed with success eventually forgets why it began to learn at all.
Meanwhile, Singapore provides a nuanced example. For decades, its rigid ranking-based education system created immense pressure. But recognizing the emotional costs, Singapore’s Ministry of Education introduced reforms in 2019, removing class rankings, broadening university admission criteria, and investing in counselling and life-skills programs. Their philosophy shifted from “Teach to Test” to “Learn for Life.” Within a few years, surveys by the OECD showed measurable reductions in student anxiety and improved creativity.
What all these nations reveal is simple but profound: true educational power lies not in how intensely a student studies, but in how meaningfully a student grows. They also show that reform is not a miracle, but a moral decision, a collective realization that children are not future employees, but future citizens.
India’s policymakers often cite Finland or Singapore in their speeches but rarely in their budgets. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 envisioned flexibility, creativity, and holistic learning, yet on the ground, its ideals drowned under the noise of JEE and NEET advertisements. The contrast between vision and reality exposes our national contradiction: we dream of innovation but fund imitation.
If India wishes to build thinkers, not just test-takers, it must reclaim education as a public good, not a private gamble. The world’s best systems show that the cure begins with trust in teachers, trust in childhood, and trust that curiosity, not coercion, is the foundation of knowledge.
A Nation’s Conscience: Reimagining Education Beyond Coaching
There comes a time in every nation’s journey when its children hold up a mirror, and what the mirror reflects is not their brilliance, but our failure to nurture it. India, today, stands before such a mirror. Beneath the floodlights of its coaching empires, beneath the rank cards and digital dashboards, there beats the tired heart of a generation that has been taught to chase, not to choose. The question is no longer how many toppers we can produce; it is whether we still remember what it means to educate a human being.
Education was never meant to be an industry; it was meant to be an inheritance. The Indian Constitution envisioned schooling as the great equalizer, a sacred duty of the State to democratize knowledge. But somewhere between policy and profit, we lost that sanctity. We allowed learning to be auctioned to the highest bidder. We turned teachers into content deliverers and children into performance graphs. In the name of competition, we replaced community; in the name of efficiency, we erased empathy.
The conscience of a nation is measured not by how it rewards success but by how it safeguards its seekers. Every suicide in Kota, every burnt-out aspirant in Mukherjee Nagar, every disillusioned youth returning to their village after “failing” an exam is not an isolated tragedy; it is a national wound. The cost of our silence is generational. When hope turns mechanical, democracy itself weakens, for no society can remain free if its young live in fear of falling behind.
Reform must therefore begin not in policy papers but in philosophy. We must restore the moral architecture of education where learning becomes an act of liberation, not a ladder of survival. Public schooling must be revived as the beating heart of the Republic. Teachers must be trained and paid to teach, not to compete with apps and YouTube stars. The State must regulate coaching centres as strictly as it regulates banks, for they now hold the nation’s future in debt.
But reform cannot be bureaucratic alone. It must be cultural. Parents must unlearn the obsession with rank; society must redefine success. A student who learns to think critically, empathize deeply, and question courageously serves the nation far more than one who merely tops a test. Media narratives must shift from celebrating marks to celebrating minds. Every story of a topper should be matched by the story of a teacher who shaped them and a policy that enabled them.
If we truly dream of a Viksit Bharat, a developed India, it cannot be built on the anxiety of its youth. It must rise on the strength of their creativity, the serenity of their minds, and the joy of their learning. As Rabindranath Tagore once wrote, “The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.”
Perhaps it is time to remember that harmony. To replace the ticking clock with open windows. To replace pressure with purpose. Let education once again be what it was always meant to be, not the means to a livelihood, but the song of a civilization.
And when the next billboard rises in Kota, may it not bear the smiling face of a topper, but the quiet eyes of a teacher who knows that the true rank of a nation is not measured in exams cleared, but in dreams allowed to live.
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