Continuing growth of coaching industry in India.
India has 1.5 million government and private schools with 50 lakhs sanctioned strength of teachers and 1200 universities in the government and private sectors. However, the most high profile entity dominating the landscape is a private coaching company with market valuation above twenty billion dollars. It is important to understand how the private coaching or tuition industry has become so widespread in India.
During and after independence, the education system in India was basic and upto the nineties the schools were the only centres of education. After returning from schools, students used to complete the homework and taking help from someone outside was considered a weakness of such students.
Tuition teachers were also considered as business minded and did not get much respect. But today the private tuition business has grown to be a parallel industry comparable to the main education system itself.
Today children rush from schools to homes only to hurry to the tuition classes.
Children in India start taking tuitions from the age of four onwards otherwise they will be left behind by other children, it is feared by parents.
The starting tuition fee for each subject is about four hundred rupees per month and can go upto 1000 rupees.
Alongwith school fees, the tuition fees combined costs 12% of the income of the lower middle class parents.
The private tuitions are bankrupting the middle classes while pushing the already bankrupt poor classes into indebtedness.
However, people have come to accept that private tuitions are the only way to good education for their children.
When the children complete 10th standard, they are compelled by the competitive environment to join the coaching for medical and engineering entrance exams for two years.
The more prominent and much publicized coaching is for the IAS ,IPS etc , in general for all the competitive civil services examinations conducted by the Central government and the about thirty state governments individually. The staff selection commission recruits upto clerical level and the Railway Recruitment Board recruits class IV employees too.
Tuition has become a more powerful necessity than regular studies and this need has been converted into a money minting system by the tuition and coaching industry.
Out of the twenty eight crore children in schools, one out of four, that is about seven crore children are dependent on tuitions. A child spends 9 hours a week in tuition classes, which is equivalent to staying in school for an additional one and a half days.
Among the states, West Bengal tops the private tuition scenario with 89% of students taking tuition from 9th to 12th standards, followed by Tripura at 87%, Bihar at 67%, Odisha at 64% and Manipur at 55%.
In tuitions, individual attention is given to each student in return for the money, the parents are happy about the good education their children are getting.
The schools usually have thirty to sixty students in each class and in such a crowd it is natural for the students to feel they do not understand the subjects well and their doubts are not getting cleared. That's why the need for tuitions has become imperative for good education.
There is another reason also, not significant enough to solve the pervasive need or problem though, that is the number of teachers not available for teaching due to the shortage of 17% from the sanctioned strength, about one on five teachers missing due to the government's lethargy in filling up the vacant posts of teachers.
The coaching and tuition business is worth 30 thousand crores, about four billion dollars, annually in 2022. It continues to grow at around 7% year on year.
Upto 12th the tuition is for good education, individual attention of each student by the tuition teacher for getting high marks.
But simultaneously, since the students want to prepare for the medical and engineering entrance exams alongwith 11th and 12th standards, they join coaching for this more importantly.
Some of them tactically skip the tuition for general subjects because they are aware that the 11th or 12th exam scores have no weightage in the medical and engineering admissions.
For M& E coaching the annual fees is around 1.5 lakh rupees and they spend three lakhs for this preparation over two years.
A global education census data says that 93% students in South Korea,83% in Malaysia and 70% students in Japan also take private tuitions. Compared to the nineties, it is clear that the private tuition industry has grown big worldwide.
Compared to global scale, India spends only 3.2 billion dollars annually in coaching industry, which is just 1.4% of the global investment or annual spending.
