Career rush turns a killer

Yet another life has been lost in Kota, the hub for coaching institutes in Rajasthan. The 16-year old NEET aspirant, who killed himself on Wednesday, is the fourth one to die this month due to mental distress owing to academic pressure.

The rat race for seats in premier medical and engineering colleges across the nation brings multitudes of aspirants from several states to the town.

Top notch scores in competitive exams by students coached in the town’s 130 and odd institutes have extended Kota’s fame far and wide. But the steady reports of suicides committed by young students have begun to unravel the seamy underside of the mad pursuit of success, the denial of which prompts them to leap into the abyss of despair.

 The town has reported 52 suicides by students enrolled in various coaching institute between January 2019 and December 2022.

The townsfolk were in for a rude shock during December last year when the town reported three students dying of suicides during the span of a day.

The institutes thrive upon the mad obsession of parents foisting students to aspire for careers in medicine or engineering without ascertaining their aptitude. The profit-oriented institutes that ‘take up the challenge’ of putting them across a grueling study schedule conduct no screening or test to find if the students are cut out for the career.

In fact, no parents would like to hear a ‘No’ from the institutes. Children severed from parental families and peers are consigned to rooms and a rigmarole that denies them a say of their own in their destiny.

Away from their homes and native towns and villages they suffer isolation and loneliness at an age that deserved them company and a family around. Classes, assignments and the breaks in between, allow them no free time to even interact among themselves.

The institutes cast a net wide enough to bring toppers from hinterland of states such as Bihar and Madhya Pradesh and spare no trick in their bag to lure top rankers. Hoardings come up all across the Hindi states much before the final 12th std. exams.

Some indulge in unethical practices to attract students as young as 13 to enroll them as dummy students in a local government school but are coached at the institutes for classes ranging from 8th to 10th std.

Attendance is not a precondition in such schools to promote them to higher classes. There is no law barring the institutes from providing coaching to high school students. Several institutes enjoy political patronage and easily avoid police action.

The Rajasthan Government set up a committee to probe into the functioning of the coaching institutes in 2019 soon after three suicides were reported on a single day. The committee had submitted its report but its contents and recommendation to regulate them were never made public. It is said pressure from politicians is behind the move to suppress it. T

he flourishing business of coaching institutes represents the failure of the mainstream education system in India. It serves as a pointer that the success is predicated upon a narrow band of careers and is measured merely in terms of lucrative pay packets they promise to the graduates.

Others not endowed with the essential wherewithal— financial as well as mental—should remain content with denial and consequent despondency