The mushrooming of coaching centres needs to be reined in. While the burgeoning coaching industry offers employment to lakhs of people, its unchecked growth has led to many mishaps that the education system can ill afford. Their unchecked growth has assumed the proportion of a menace that poses risks to the education system as well as students. The latest incident in Delhi, where three students died due to flooding of a ‘study circle’ located in a building’s basement is only the tip of the iceberg. More troubling issues have surfaced in the not-too-distant past. Coaching centres have also been at the centre of several question paper leaks as well as other irregularities in exams as consequential as the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test. The coaching industry in India is estimated to be a Rs 50,000-60,000-crore business and is expected to touch the Rs 1.5 lakh crore mark in the next five years.
Almost all this growth has been unregulated. In January this year, the Union education ministry came up with a set of guidelines for the sector. The norms have specific requirements in terms of infrastructure and safety for each coaching centre. They urge registering each institute to bring them into the legal framework, maintaining a healthy teacher-students ratio, a minimum admission age, and curriculums to be followed.
The guidelines are comprehensive and, at times, even overarching. But the sector needs a more basic set of implementable norms for providing a healthy environment to students. While the central government issued the guidelines, it is the state and local governments that need to ensure their implementation. Most other laws that have a bearing on the industry are also local.
There is much at stake. Most coaching institutes train students for admission in a few select educational institutes or get through the tough civil services exams. So the competition is ruthless. The entry of online tuition companies has made the space even more competitive. Therefore, the need to stay ahead of others forces coaching institutes to resort to unfair and unscrupulous means. India also needs to have an education policy that tries to reduce the dependence of students on coaching centres to pass some exams to gain admission into reputed institutes. The need, in part, is also to have a much higher budgetary allocation than the current 2 percent of the GDP.