Kota Factory, Season 2

While Online Ed-tech Companies Eye The Brick-And-Mortar World Of Coaching Centres In The City, Traditional Institutes Are Extending Their Digital Arms To Remain On Top Of The Game

- Rohit Parihar

IT'S A BUSY TIME IN RAJASTIHAN's Kota city, known as a hub of coaching centres for students aspiring to join India's top engineering and medical institutes. After two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, coaching classes are abrim with students, and competition is heating up with the entry of new players, who are pioneers in online coaching and are now venturing into the offfline space.

During lunch breaks or towards the end of evening sessions, large numbers of students wearing the uniforms of one coaching centre or the other crowd the streets, especially along a stretch of the Kota-Jhalawar highway, where some half a dozen institutes are located within walking distance of each other. The hostels, nearly all of them privately run, are full, and many more students have taken up paying guest accommodation or stay in rented rooms. The unusually high number of students in July and August is because new batches are coming in even as old batches are yet to leave due to postponed examinations during the pandemic.

Soon, graduates and post-graduates will also be seen at coaching centres in Kota and the state's capital, Jaipur, as some institutes are looking beyond engineering and medical entrance tests.

Resonance Eduventures has already diversified to offer coaching for the Central Universities Entrance Test (CUET) and for streams like chartered accountancy, while ALLEN Career Institute launched its first coaching centre for the civil services examination in Jaipur on September 6.

In a parallel development, well-known names from the offline coaching space are adopting online modes, which often requires them to modify their business model. As a result, students have more choices and sometimes get major discounts in fees, though there is hardly any difference in the quality or methodology of teaching among the available options. The coaching centres aim to grab as big a share of the pie as possible.