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9486 in the collection
India's Cram-School Confidential: Town Fills With Teens Studying Full-Time
Students study full-time for
two years just for one college entrance
exam.
By Eric Bellman
KOTA, India -- Hoping to boost his chances of
getting into a top college, Rohit Agarwal quit
his high school and left home.
The 16-year-old moved from the far northeast
corner of India in June, with two suitcases and
a shoulder bag. He took a two-hour flight and a
six-hour train ride to the dusty town of Kota,
India's cram-school capital.
More than 40,000 students show up in the arid
state of Rajasthan every year, looking to
attend one of the 100-plus coaching schools
here. These intensive programs, which are
separate from regular high school, prepare
students for college-entrance exams. In Kota,
most of the schools focus on the prestigious
Indian Institutes of Technology.
The seven IITs nationwide are statistically
tougher to get into than Harvard or Cambridge.
While around 310,000 students took the entrance
exam this April, only the top 8,600 were
accepted. A whopping one-third of those winners
in the current academic year passed through
Kota's cramming regimen.
"If we stayed at home, we just wouldn't be able
to study enough," says Mr. Agarwal as he takes
a break from lessons. "If you don't study hard,
you won't get admission."
Today, he starts studying at 7 a.m., works on
practice problems until noon. After lunch, he
goes to class, where he gets the answers to the
problems, gets home around 8 p.m. and does
homework until midnight.
Kota has become a cram-industry boom town as
more Indians seek to send their children to
college and economic expansion has far
outstripped the increase in college placements,
making the competition fiercer.
Students study full-time for two years just for
one entrance exam, mostly for the IITs but also
for other universities and colleges. The rigor
has become part of its selling point: As Kota's
reputation for success has spread, more young
hopefuls have flocked to the city.
"At first, around eight of us studied around my
dining-room table. Then I added a few stools to
make it 12, then I added a foot to each side of
the table," says Vinod Kumar Bansal, who is
credited with starting the cram-school craze
when he began tutoring students in the 1980s.
He went on to found Bansal Classes, the city's
first cram school, called "coaching institutes"
here.
It all started because Mr. Bansal grew ill. He
was working in a chemicals factory when he
started having trouble climbing steps; he later
discovered he had muscular dystrophy, a
hereditary muscle disease for which there is no
cure. "My plan was to become a chief engineer
of the plant or a general manager but things
went in a different direction," he says.
A few of his early students got into an IIT and
word spread. Parents in Kota, and then beyond,
started asking for his help. In 1991, he
started a school, Bansal Classes. He initiated
an entrance exam for his own school to identify
the brightest prospects for IIT success.
He developed an intensive study system that
bombards students with test questions for nine
hours a day for two years. They only teach what
is on the IIT exams -- mathematics, physics and
chemistry.
Now, Bansal Classes' 17,000 students study six
days a week. One Sunday a month, they have a
six-hour test which is set up just like the IIT
exam. After two years, students have taken the
mock test more than 20 times.
The course of classes costs up to $1,500 a
year, a hefty price for many Indian families.
But the payoff can be huge: An IIT degree
vaults a graduate into the global elite.
Graduates include Vinod Khosla, co-founder of
Sun Microsystems Inc., and Arun Sarin, former
chief executive of Vodafone Group PLC, the
U.K.-based phone company. More than 1,500
Bansal Classes students got into IIT in the
academic year that started in July.
Last year, Bansal Classes opened a new, bigger
campus that is in better condition than some
IITs and is fully wheelchair accessible for Mr.
Bansal, who still teaches up to five classes a
day. Girls represent 13% of the students, a
percentage that is climbing. They wear light-
blue polo shirts that say, "Bansalite today,
IITian tomorrow." The boys have no uniforms.
The Bansal campus is strangely quiet. Teachers
say there are rarely disciplinary problems,
except for the occasional student sneaking into
a class to repeat it, and a bit of graffiti.
Even that is aspirational: The writing on one
metal bench says, "Bansalites rock, IIT rocks,
Lyf after IIT rox."
Mr. Bansal, 58, says he is now worth more than
$20 million. His mobility has declined to the
point where he can barely lift a pen. But he
says being in a wheelchair 12 hours a day means
he has more time to think of challenging
questions for students. "Teaching is my
breakfast, lunch and dinner," he says.
IIT officials have no official opinion on the
cram schools. However, some public and private
schools have complained that they are losing
their brightest students to such programs.
While some parents complain that the coaching
classes give students an unfair advantage and
an unbalanced education, Bansal teachers say
their students aren't taught enough in regular
schooling, so cram courses are needed to help
them get into the IITs.
The success of Bansal Classes spawned dozens of
imitators, many of them started by Mr. Bansal's
former employees. Some even teach students how
to ace the entrance exam to get into Bansal
Classes.
Cramming has been the salvation of Kota, an
industrial center in the 1970s that then fell
on hard times. In the past three years, new
malls, restaurants, hotels, Internet cafes and
clothing stores began to spring up to serve the
16- and 17-year-old cram kids. Many homeowners
have added second and third floors to rent out
to students.
Balwan Diwani, manager of Milan Cycle, a bike
shop in Kota, says bicycle sales have surged to
more than 2,000 a year from fewer than 200 five
years ago. Mamta Bansal, no relation to the
school founder, quit her job as a maid to start
a service to deliver boxed lunches and dinners
to 30 students as they study. "We try to make
what their mothers would cook for them," she
says. "I have had to learn how to make dishes
from Gujarat, the Punjab and southern India."
Local schools also have benefited: Cram
students have to attend regular classes so they
can pass their high-school exams and graduate.
Some high schools have early morning classes so
cram students can finish early and move on to
cramming.
"There used to be a lot of hooliganism and
goons," says Pradeep Singh Gour, director of
the Lawrence and Mayo Public School in Kota.
"Now the entire city is like a university
campus."
Mr. Agarwal, the student from the northeast,
says that if he gets into IIT, he would like to
study aeronautical engineering and eventually
work at the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration in the U.S. One of his cousins
used his IIT degree to get a high-paying job
working for Merrill Lynch & Co. in Tokyo.
He got average scores on recent practice exams,
though, which he knows will not be good enough.
"IITs seats are limited but boys trying to get
in are unlimited," he says.
— Eric Bellman
Wall Street Journal
2008-09-28
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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