My hometown is Sikar, and my house sits inside this coaching neighbourhood. The coaching industry arrived here in 1996. In less than three decades, a town once known for sending young men to the Gulf for work and into the Army for stability, reinvented itself around teenagers solving biology and physics questions for social mobility.
Sikar was marketed as an affordable ‘mini Kota’. But the praise carries the weight of student breakdowns and suicides. The model was the same. Students came from villages and small towns where families sold land, took loans, and put together every resource to push their child into the coaching machine.
Even my family took me to one of these institutes in 2011, showing me a small room where I was expected to study for the next two years without distraction. The existential dread of that PG almost pulled out an Edvard Munch kind of scream from me, and I told them I was ready to do anything to escape that life.
In Sikar, competitive exams are treated with the seriousness of military operations, and every student is a soldier trying to escape the humiliation of being called berozgaar. If someone gets selected, the entire town is informed through giant hoardings, photos of toppers hanging on electricity poles, local newspapers, and walls plastered with AIR ranks, which sometimes have headlines like ‘Chu liya asmaan’ (I have touched the sky). Institutes bring out DJs, garlands and parade toppers like local gods with rath-style processions. In 2016, one coaching institute even gifted a BMW to a student for securing AIR 11 in IIT-JEE.
Every selection produces two emotions simultaneously. Relief for the family whose child made it, and melancholy for those whose children did not. Mothers stare at topper posters and wonder when the face of their own child will appear there. Happiness, shame, prestige, anxiety, marriage prospects, migration dreams, and family honour slowly become attached to rank lists. Everyone wants to become that family whose child cracked NEET or IIT.
Perhaps this is the only place where Ravish Kumar’s old appeal, Aap TV mat dekhiye, was adopted with sincerity. Parents sacrifice their TVs when their children join a coaching institute so that they do not accidentally learn the dangerous art of relaxation. In the coaching economy, leisure is the ultimate sin.
Coaching institutes are enormously powerful entities, deeply tied to the politics and economy of the region. A successful institute slowly expands into hostels, franchises, real estate, and sometimes even private medical colleges. Some institutes even advertise that students who clear NEET through their coaching can later enrol as doctors in their medical colleges. The system feeds itself. This is the loop. But the reality is that this loop works too. Many families have escaped poverty because their children cleared competitive exams. This is true of my own extended family, where ranks changed the fortunes of households struggling financially. In today’s India, these exams remain one of the few workable ladders of upward mobility. But the system itself is also vulnerable to rigging, exploitation, and manipulation.
This is also what makes the paper leak controversy so revealing. It exposes the desperation underneath India’s aspiration economy, a desperation that inevitably opens up parallel markets of leaks, brokers and shortcuts. And along with it comes the unbearable emotional burden this machinery places on lakhs of students. Yet every year, thousands continue entering this system despite knowing how unforgiving and distorted it can be. Perhaps in India, the exam system survives not because people trust it, but because they distrust everything else even more.
