After two years, it is clear that the institutes have successfully passed the difficult transition phase amid the pandemic.
New Delhi: In March 2020, like most parts of India, life came to a standstill in Kota, the coaching capital of the country located in Rajasthan, as a majority of the 2,50,000-odd students from across the country starting making every possible move to reach their hometown through the help of their respective state governments amid the Covid pandemic.
As the pandemic disturbed the offline academic activities in the city, the coaching institutes in India’s biggest coaching hub was facing an existential crisis. Within weeks of the starting of the pandemic, it was clear that the offline coaching classes will not be like the pre-Covid times and the new online coaching giants and YouTube channels like BYJU’s, Unacademy will give a tough competition to these Kota-based coaching institutes in pre-medical and pre- engineering preparations. The immediate challenge for Kota-based coaching institutes like Allen coaching institute, Career Point, Resonance etc was to switch to digital mode and reach their students who are now located in different parts of the country. After two years, it is clear that Kota’s coaching institutes have successfully passed the transition phase.
“Within a week of the lockdown, our online platform was fully functional and we were successful in reaching nearly 20,000 of our enrolled students which was roughly 95% of the total aspirants who were taking our offline coaching before the lockdowns. In our online platform, we are providing all the facilities which were available during offline classes,” said a faculty of Physics who teaches in Resonance coaching institute. “Even now, though the lockdown phase is over and many activities are returning to normal, hardly 50% students have returned to Kota to attend the offline classes. We are giving them online classes through the platforms and the students are satisfied,” he added.
Talking to The Sunday Guardian, Tarun Jain, who teaches in a reputed coaching institute of Kota, said, “The coaching institutes of the city have realized that online is the future. In May 2020, we had a long discussion in our coaching institute about what should be our next move; everyone present in the conference call was convinced that it is hard for the city to return to pre-Covid days. Moreover, many online coaching platforms which have big capital investment are making their way into the industry. Hence, we also need to change our methods. We shifted to online. The second wave had a devastating impact on the minds of parents as they were wary of sending their wards to Kota. Therefore, even now, more than half of our students are taking online classes sitting at home.”
All the coaching institutes based in Kota have adopted the online method. As per various estimates, before the pandemic the city attracted roughly 2-2.5 lakh students from different parts of the country. Even in 2021, the number of enrolled students through online and offline medium is around two lakh, meaning there is no dip in the students getting enrolled in the Kota-based coaching institutes, but now due to the pandemic, more than half are taking online classes sitting at home.
During the 1980s, Kota was a growing industrial town of Rajasthan with JK Industries, which used to employ 8,000-odd workers. The industry shut down in the late 1980s, and people started calling Kota a dead city. But an engineer named V.K. Bansal, who was an employee with JK Industries, had the idea to turn the tables. He started teaching mathematics to engineering aspirants from 1988. Later, he got support from a few other engineers who worked in the erstwhile JK industries that included Pramod Maheshwari, who later founded Career Point. In 1995, their efforts yielded results as more than 40 students qualified the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-JEE entrance examination. The results established Kota as the coaching hub in Rajasthan and students from other parts of the state started coming for preparations. It was a time when many teachers started their own coaching institutes, like Brajesh Maheshwari started Allen coaching institute. It led to positive competition among the coaching institutes.
Within five years, Kota made a name for itself in the country as six of the 10 toppers of the IIT entrance examination studied here. Year after year, the story remained the same, results from Kota-based institutes are high in comparison to any other city. The results attracted more than two lakh students to the city from 2008 onwards which led to the establishment of about 30 big and 100-odd small coaching institutes between 2006-2016 period and despite the pandemic, the coaching institutes are witnessing enrollment of more than two lakh students as the coaching institutes have shifted to online teaching keeping in mind the changing demand of the industry.