As the coaching industry grew, a parallel economy emerged with over 4,000 registered and unregistered hostels, 5,000 paying guest accommodations and hundreds of budget eateries catering to a large number of students and their families who come to this small town on the banks of river Chambal in eastern Rajasthan.

The town quite clearly thrives on the student-driven economy. But many feel – and the often-repeated one-liner is an example – that the town’s economy has flourished despite – and by disregarding – suicides by students and the mental stress they face.

Since 2015, as per the local authority's data, as many as 122 students have died by suicide in Kota with 23 reported this year alone.

An HT analysis of the deaths in 2023 shows that more than half of them were minors (younger than 18 years of age); 12 did so within six months of arriving in Kota. Many, the analysis shows, were from families that are either poor or come from economically lower middle-class backgrounds.

An overwhelming majority of the students who died by suicide were male; they were preparing for the medical entrance exam and were from towns and villages in north India, particularly from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the analysis showed.

How Kota became a coaching hub

Director of Vibrant Academy, M S Chauhan, who worked with Bansal who died in 2021, has seen the transformation of the town into a major coaching hub. Not all the changes have been for good.

“There is a huge difference in the Bansal model of coaching and the model followed by most of the top coaching centres these days," he said.

Bansal was a mechanical engineer from Uttar Pradesh and was working at a cloth factory in Kota. He was teaching mathematics in the 1970s when he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy.

Chauhan recollected Bansal starting his home-based coaching centre with only eight students. As the years rolled by, some of their students started performing well on the JEE exam.

In 1989, Bansal’s taste of success and recognition came when one of his students secured top positions at JEE followed by three more students securing top positions in 1990.

"It was the first time Kota came to the limelight -- a small city can also beat the big cities in such high-profile examinations," said Chauhan.

As the town’s big factories including the cloth factory started failing, Bansal looked for alternative income routes and found his niche: He started his own institute and emerged as the “godfather” of Kota as a coaching hub. Bansal established Kota’s first major institute in 1997.

Chauhan who worked at Bansal’s institute, said that he became popular for teaching students who cleared the JEE exam, which in turn triggered a heavy rush of students trying to enrol at his centre.

“For years Bansal had no competitor in Kota and hundreds of students were enrolled in his institute… the faculty also became popular,” he said.

In the backdrop of Bansal centre’s flourishing business, other coaching centres started to mushroom in Kota.

The big transformation came in 2011-12 when rival institutes poached 25 key faculty members from Bansal’s centre.

The poaching of faculty provided a firmer foothold to new players in the education industry in Kota; they also attracted students affiliated with the faculty.

“For them (the new centres), it was a business venture and they were willing to pay any salary to popular faculty,” said Bansal centre’s former employee, now working at another popular coaching centre.

Chauhan recalled Bansal never admitted students who failed to clear the aptitude test for JEE. That approach has changed.

He regretted that Bansal’s approach got negated once he was no longer a “key player in the game" and newer institutes with better marketing plans took over.

"That institute and many others like them never followed the model Bansal followed where students were taken through a mandatory entrance test… Entrance (exams) should be mandated for all as not all students are capable of this coaching (standard)," Chauhan said.

In 2022, the state government nudged coaching institutes to introduce aptitude tests for admission. The implementation of the rule, however, remains faulty.

“There is no standardisation of the test and no third-party monitoring. It means any student can still get admission,” said another faculty member of a coaching institute in Kota.

Many in Kota believe that the town does not want to let the student number to fall as it would impact its economy and, therefore, there is immense political pressure on the administration not to act against erring coaching institutes.

What ails Kota

The HT analysis clearly showed that children, even as young as 15, are being sent to the highly competitive academic world of Kota where they have to compete with students who are more skilled.

Parents believe that sending them to Kota would change their lives without realising the physiological impact the experience can have on children from smaller towns and villages.

The district administration has estimated that over 70% students in Kota are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, most from small towns and villages. District police data show that 16 out of the 23 students who died by suicide this year were from UP and Bihar and their parents are mostly in farming and few in the government sector.

Kota’s celebration culture

A culture of celebration has also become synonymous with Kota: Those who top NEET and JEE exams are celebrated with their photographs plastered in multiple cities as advertisements for their respective coaching institutions and are held up as examples by society.

This celebration culture has a dark side.

Experts say this creates undue pressure on students who fail to get top rankings at NEET and JEE.

On August 17 2023, Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot announced that the government might bring regulatory actions to stop celebrating toppers but it continues.

Considering that such topper-oriented advertisements might not be banned entirely, Naveen Jain, school education department secretary, said: “My view is that the coaching centres should celebrate failure along with the success. The success-oriented advertisements put stress on the weaker students. Celebration of failures will show them that their life is not ending here. If it is not engineering or medical, there are a lot of roads wide open for them.”

Kneejerk response to suicides

The Kota district administration reacted to the two suicides on August 27 by announcing a guideline to regulate coaching and hostel management.

The administration set up a students' cell comprising police officers to daily keep track of students who are stressed. It also directed hostel authorities to install spring-loaded fans in all rooms “to provide students mental support and security", a move that was questioned by many.

An expert committee led by Rajasthan’s higher education department secretary Bhawani Detha has suggested additional measures to check the rising number of suicides in Kota. The panel directed the centres to conduct fun activities to de-stress students every Wednesday, upload motivational videos on online platforms, consider reducing the syllabus to reduce pressure, and also suspend all weekly tests for the next two months.

Experts are not convinced.

"Such measures taken by the government will never work as we never focus on the root cause that the syllabus proposed for the JEE and NEET examination is beyond the comprehension of 12th standard students, which compel them to take admission in the coaching institute that has turned the students into a commodity,” Rajeev Gupta, a retired sociology professor of the Rajasthan University, said.

Gupta said coaching centres unleash an “emotional violence” on the students who majorly hail from a middle class or lower middle-class background across the country by providing them “no space for looking out (at) the wider world, celebrating different cultures at one place; they only make them run for competition.”

Chauhan, quoted earlier in the story, said the problem primarily lies in how many in the sector approach the business of academics, not in the entire industry.

“The institutes had adopted the ‘topper-oriented' classroom idea which discriminates against the students who are not best. (Many) Institutes run separate batches (with only 60 to 70 in one while a standard batch has over 150 students) with a selected group of students who are capable of bringing rank in the exams,” he said.

Not everyone agrees with the argument.

A faculty of a coaching institute, for one, refuted Chauhan’s argument and said teaching methods at his institute are different even though the examination level is the same for all students.

The teacher, who asked not to be named because the topic of student suicides is sensitive, explained that his institute conducts a 'scholarship test' (instead of an entrance) during admission through which a section of students gets identified at the very beginning as ‘the ones capable of securing top ranks.’

The institute creates a special batch for them. Later, the students who perform exceptionally well in weekly tests can also be promoted to those batches.

“Considering their talent and capability we assign them some special exercises that a ‘normal student' will never be able to do," the teacher said.

"If we assign the same problems (indicating the advanced problems which are more difficult than 12th standard levels but essential to train a student for 'JEE or NEET level') to both weak and brilliant students in one class, the weaker (ones) will become more mentally weak. We don't want that. That will push more students into depression," he said.

But speaking to students – the real stakeholders in this tale – gives a different picture of the situation on the ground in Kota.

A student from the same institute whose batchmate died by suicide on August 4 expressed his discontentment, saying, "Toppers get free hostel facility which is attached to the institute building. The teachers always reach out to them willingly while we are often rebuked in the class even if we go to clear the same doubt twice."

The faculty member said, "We are only teachers…We are not deliberately putting these students in such an environment. I believe these kids and their parents should judge their capability before sending them to Kota. These are business tycoons of the coaching hub. They will only run behind money."

“There is a separate class and incentives for 30-40 bright students in a batch and others have to face pressure because of this discrimination,” Gupta said, claiming that the teachers in these coaching institutes also fail to help the students as they become service providers under the new brand of teaching initiated by the coaching centres," Gupta, the sociology professor quoted earlier, said.

He also said that many students coming from states such as Bihar and UP face problems in learning and communicating in English because the language might not have been their first language during school education.

Given their humble backgrounds, Gupta said many of these students also face cultural issues in Kota, which are not addressed by the administration or coaching institutes, leading to problems related to low confidence and lack of self-worth.

Lack of psychological counselling

In December 2022, district administration asked coaching centres to appoint professional psychiatrists at the coaching centres. However, administration officials admitted that many coaching institutes have hired psychiatrists in an arbitrary manner and these appointments are not really monitored.

A Kota-based psychiatrist, who was invited by a coaching centre to be part of a panel to select and appoint psychiatrists at a top coaching centre, shed light on the process and the flaws in it.

"I could find only one who is a certified and professional psychiatrist. He is now the principal psychiatrist of the institute. The rest were not even from a medical background. Most of them were social workers whom we had to appoint in the centre’s counselling team as the institute wanted us to do that considering the lack of professional psychiatrists in such a small city like Kota," the psychiatrist said.

Students said they are often not provided with correct counselling.

“I went to a psychologist appointed by the coaching institute… after spending three to four days in his room…he suggested only to focus on academics instead of spending more screen time and the outer world," said a student, whose roommate had died by suicide on June 16 this year.

Regular psychological tests for students are a must if deaths by suicide are to be prevented, Vinayak Pathak, a prominent Kota-based psychiatrist said.

"Most of these coaching centres don't appoint professional psychiatrists and never conduct daily psychological tests for students. It is a must. (If conducted) The coaching centres will at least be able to keep track of the vulnerable students and guide (them and) their parents correctly. Coaching institutes need to be honest with parents on career evaluation of the students.”