Anupam- The Dreamer

Today, I read a story again in the news about yet another suicide of an aspiring young student in the education city of Kota. This issue has over the time become the biggest curse of this education city, a curse which has overshadowed innumerable hidden success stories and is slowly tarnishing the magnanimous contribution that this small city has made in the world of education. On the face of it, it just looks like suicide by a depressed student, but it is much more than that! A student suicide is not just the loss of a precious life, it is rather a culmination of several structural and systemic failures in our education system in particular and society in general, which pushes the minor child to the extreme step of suicide. To go into the depth of the story, we have to go several layers beneath this malaise.

Let us start with the story of hitherto not-so-known city called Kota. The city, erstwhile a princely state of Kotah, was not traditionally an educational or coaching hub as it has become today. Earlier, in 1980s and 1990s, it boasted off numerous small and medium scale industries which attracted people from nearby districts who came in search of employment. You must have heard the name of Kota stone, which is now ubiquitous with affordability, durability and robustness and can be found studded in many buildings across the country. Kota doria sarees is another unique creation of artisans of Kota. Blessed with the perennial Chambal river, the city benefitted from the round-the-year water availability, which attracted capital investments in the form of Thermal Power plant, Cement plants, Fertilizer plants etc. Some small scale industries like oil mills, pulse mills also gave this city as sobriquet of being called “Kanpur of Rajasthan”. But, as they say it “the city was cursed with industrial collapses”, and soon many industries started to shut down one by one. JK, IL, Samcor fell like the dominos.

But, as they say it, where there is a will there is a way. From the curse of collapse of the industries, the city saw a new dream which flourished in the eyes of Mr. Vinod Kumar Bansal, the messiah of Kota coaching industry. After being diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and paralyzed from below the waist, Mr. Bansal had to bid adieu to his job in JK. A foreign doctor advised him to start teaching, so as to divert his attention from the incurable illness. So, from the loss of one hope to beginning of another hope, thus started the journey of Kota coaching industry. What began as a small hobby and a timepass activity, soon sprawled into a passion of Mr. Bansal. And in year 2000, a relatively non-descript and unknown city of Kota, flashed as a beacon on the landscape of India. You know the reason? Because in this year, Bansal Classes produced IIT-JEE All India Rank 1, which was no small feat by any measure. And then the success saga started, with Kota alone accounting for the largest number of toppers who cracked this tough exam year on year. And so the hitherto unknown city started its journey to become the “Mecca of coaching industry” as it is known today, surpassing the likes of Kanpur, Allahbad and Hyderabad.

Students from all over the country thronged to Kota, thanks to its easy connectivity, affordable PGs, hostels, a vast network of mess, stationary shops and auto walas. It was like a sleeping and dying city got a new lease of life. The Kota walas embraced this opportunity with open arms, lakhs of unemployed people in the Hadoti region of Rajasthan saw a dream for a better tomorrow. Coaching industry sprawled, and so did the peripheral commercial establishments. The entire ecosystem of the localities like Vigyan Nagar, Talwandi, Rajiv Gandhi Nagar was built around the coaching institutes and the requirements of students.

You name the requirement of the student and Kota walas were ready to provide. What does a student need? A Place to study- Best coaching institutes are there. Good teachers- they got the best in the country. Home to stay- kota walas started renting rooms in the homes (hostels in Kota were later developments when there was huge influx of money). Good hygienic food- A number of mess centres came up, which provided every variety of food. Kachori shops and poha thelas multiplied like anything. Stationary shops- you throw a stone and it will hit a stationary shop. Cycle shops- just don’t ask, they became crorepatis. Essentially, Kota catered to every requirement of the serious students.

Then, with the increasing number of students which soon crossed 2 lakhs, the amount of revenue that started pouring in increased exponentially, running into hundreds and thousands of crores. This on one hand was increasing the prosperity of the coaching institutes, star teachers, kota walas in general, but on the other hand also brought with it the ill-effects of greediness. A number of Gaming zones and cyber cafes cropped up, where non-serious students watched blue films at night (in 2000s, 2010s internet was not so cheap you know), played Tekken 3 the whole day on gaming parlours, and indulged in all sorts of time-wasting habits, which took them away from their focus on studies. Sometime later, drugs also sneaked in the relatively sober Kota society. The rich spoiled lads of the rich parents started drug culture. Some from the poor backgrounds started their own gangs, with fresh students in Kota as their new recruits. The only requirement was that you speak their language and share their crooked ethos. “Bihar Tigers” was also in news sometime back, where they taught students to steal mobile phones and cycles, to fund their desires. These are some of the problems that crop up in every big city, Kota was certainly not the first one. As one of my friends said “Jahan achai hai, wahan burai bhi hai”. The yin and yang co-exist. But, if the problems remained restricted to these only, then also it wouldn’t have assumed alarming proportion, till this biggest curse hit the “Mecca of coaching industry”.

And what was that curse??? Student suicides! The suicides which increased year on year, and have not stopped till date. It is just the tip of the iceberg, which is visible to our naked eyes. The problem goes very deep to several structural and systemic failures at many levels. Talking about the education system, our education system is geared to produce run-of-the-mill workers for jobs. And with such a large population with limited number of seats in the engineering and medical colleges, the competition becomes cut-throat. And in this battleground, the weaker students lose hope and some even fall into depression. If this was not enough, then the other woes of our education system rub salt to the wound, as we are structured to think that if we are not good at studies, then it is the end of the world for us. We don’t inculcate the love of learning in our schools, and at best our curriculum is designed to produce workers who can work incessantly for factories. No wonder there is a series on Netflix called “Kota factory”, where the finished product is the carefully crafted worker. Although, the series touches some darker aspects of student’s life, but the reality is much harsher than that. The problem of suicides is not as easy to understand as it seems, because multiple reasons snowball to push the students into taking this extreme step.

Apart from systemic faults in the education system, there are multitudes of societal factors which push students to the edge. A number of financial constraints on the part of the parents, lack of counselling facilities in coaching centres, living alone in a new city, low level of maturity at such a tender age etc. results in high stress levels in the students which nudge them to take this extreme step. Some students buckle under the huge stress.  But more often than not, in my opinion, it is the mismatch between the parental & societal expectations from the dreams/goals of the child, which is a primary and one of the most important factors here leading to student suicides. News reports suggest that many students who took this extreme step wrote in their suicide notes that they didn’t want to pursue IIT-JEE or NEET, but were forced to pursue these by family, relatives and peer pressure. Coupled by the burden of their parental expectations who often borrow money to fund their wards to study in coaching centres, further adds to students’ misery amidst rising expectations to deliver. I remember vividly an elderly person telling to one of my relatives, who was a preparing for competitive exam and failed one time, that “Beta tumko to pata hi hai tumhari maali haalat achi nahi hai, tumhe to aur zyada mehnat karni chahiye thi!”.

But what we must understand is that one particular stream of higher study is not the end of the road. And every parent must understand that every child is special and unique. They may not be good at Maths, Physics, Chemistry or Biology, but they may be good in other streams. They must allow the children freedom to pursue whatever they like to do. For that matter, in today’s times studies is not just the ONLY option, it is only one of the several great options. Many avenues of professional careers have opened up like sports, entertainment industry, entrepreneurship and what not. If the student feels liberated and has freedom, then he/she can do great in chosen endeavour, without any stress. And just imagine what a beautiful society we can create where everyone is allowed and has the opportunity to pursue what he/she wants. That will bring excellence in all fields and add to our diversity of the intellectual capital of our nation. But it will happen only if we are ready to take remedial steps.

It is said that taking the first step is the most difficult, but somewhere we have to take that step into addressing the root causes of this grave crisis that has started to unfold before us. Student suicides is the culmination of all these root causes of the bigger problems confronted by the students. We cannot bury our heads like ostrich in the sand and just lament the loss of young lives that had numerous dreams in their eyes. We cannot abandon our students and let them be at the mercy of the problems created by our own society.

This is the curse of Kota that is still not gone away. A city which carefully nurtured the dreams of lakhs of students till now cannot be left to become a curse for the same students. The creator should not become the destroyer. And I would want to see that Kota remains a “city of dreamers”, a city which has given and is still giving the wings to the dreams of lakhs of students who come to this small city with a hope for a better future. And as Andy Dufresne remarked in the famous movie Shawshank Redemption-“Remember. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”