On July 29, 2024, while allowing the discussion under Rule 176 on the death of three UPSC aspirants in a coaching centre in Old Rajendra Nagar, New Delhi area, Vice-President Jagdeep Dhankhar remarked, “I find that youth demographic dividend of the country has to be nurtured, I further find that coaching has become virtually commerce.” He further added, “In a country where opportunities are getting enlarged, this silo is turning out to be a problem. They are becoming no less than a gas chamber.”
Maybe this is the only time in the last decade that a student movement of this scale has erupted in Delhi since the JNU incident of the year 2016. The protests might seem sudden but discontent has been simmering for a long time waiting for a critical point to vent and erupt. Huge uproar and protests by aspirants are neither wrong nor unwarranted because the underbelly of the coaching industry has been flourishing without checks and balances and there needs to be some accountability.
As someone who has been on both sides of the fence, as an aspirant and a faculty member, let me tell you things are worse than they seem in the UPSC coaching industry.
As an aspirant when I took classes in a well-known civil services coaching institute in Old Rajinder Nagar, in the year 2017, during monsoon season rainwater gushing into the basement classrooms and aspirants either taking rickshaws to avoid knee-deep-water-clogged roads or just making their way to classes risking their lives was a common ordeal. And this happens every year without any recourse. One often hears that the infrastructure is crumbling but it has crumbled in Old Rajinder Nagar where slum-like conditions prevail and the cruel invisible hands of the market force the youth of the country to pay irrationally high amounts to live in these conditions. This is not limited to just the Old Rajinder Nagar area but also the adjacent colonies like West Patel Nagar and Moti Nagar, and Mukherjee Nagar.
Paying more than Rs 15,000 for a 10 by 10-foot dingy room, with poor ventilation and lacking basic amenities, is not something rare to be found in the UPSC hubs. Since many who come to these places are from middle-class families and cannot pay such high rents, they sometimes share a room with as many as four people. The irony of all this is that one does not use these expensive but beat-up rooms to study, for that you have to join libraries which have been rightly mocked by stand-up comic Anubhav Singh Bassi in one of his sets. These so-called libraries do not have books to offer but only separated seating spaces where one can come, sit and study. The charge ranges from Rs 1,500 to Rs 3,500 monthly for providing a seating space, a locker and one washroom shared by more than a hundred people sometimes. The incident, on July 27, 2024, in the Old Rajinder Nagar area, happened in one such library being run by a leading coaching institute in Delhi.
But what makes the thousands of youths, including the graduates of premier institutions like IITs, IIMs and AIIMS, flock to UPSC Civil service examination preparation and travail for many years wasting the prime of their lives? Although many would claim a deep desire for social service, this answer should be reserved for UPSC interviews. There can be a one-word answer for this: feudal mindset. In a post-colonial country like India where opportunities are few and aspirations plenty, the IAS is a sure-shot way to change your social strata. The words ‘’Collector” or “SP” (Superintendent of Police) or Income Tax Commissioner invite admiration, respect, fear and reverence all at the same time. To make matters worse, the irrational presence of the state where it should not be and its inexplicable absence where it should be invites a lot of megalomania among people. All this leads to a desire to become “collector babu”.
This desire is exploited by coaching institutions which charge exorbitant fees to provide dubious copy-paste folderol study material easily available in photocopy shops for a few hundred rupees. Lakhs are charged to provide “mentorship” where they teach you how to read newspapers and basic NCERT books. In these coaching centres, dishonestly called institutes, the qualifications of teachers are itself questionable. The criteria for hiring teachers are either exhausted attempts or their celebrity-like status. It will not be staggering if you find a maths graduate teaching constitutional law or an engineer teaching history.
In a social media and status-driven society, where views are assets which can directly be translated into monetary benefits, teachers want to become influencers. In this process, students and aspirants have been reduced to paying subscribers. These putative teachers are found on Instagram reels and YouTube shorts telling their potential audience that if they prepare for the UPSC exam, even if they do not become an IAS, they will become ‘’something”. Here something is the undefined jobless herd of millions evaluating either test copies at coaching centres or doing grunt work for the highly paid faculties for a meagre sum. The unnecessary but effective romanticisation of the struggles of aspirants and glamorisation of civil services have been done not only through reels but also through movies and drama series, sponsored by coaching institutes.
What is often not talked about is the fact that with the coaching industry comes a secondary yet crucial industry that is the ‘motivation industry’, loaded with blood-boiling poems and rags-to-riches success stories. In this industry, aspirants are given something to hold on to in the choppy waters of uncertainty with a promise of salutary effect. This industry provides the base to keep the civil services aspirants in the rat race that is preparation.
To make matters worse, UPSC has contributed to all the woos and done nothing to solve the issues faced by the aspirants. The unpredictability of the exam has further led to the flourishing of the coaching centres. Take the CSE prelims of the year 2023. For the general category, the general studies cut-off was 75.41 marks (out of 200) down from 88.22 in 2022 and 116 marks in 2016. Why? Apparently, UPSC has been trying to ensure weeding out of predictability and in-process coaching centres. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and this too has led to the rise of CSAT classes and more sordid and subterfuge courses being offered by the coaching centres.
Will the recent heart-wrenching incidents lead to any change? Who can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not, but one thing is certain: The reputation of UPSC is in tatters. Whether it is because of the Pooja Khedkar incident or the alleged opacity of the entire exam process, vicissitude on the horizon of UPSC can be seen clearly. As far as we as a society are concerned, we have shown the remarkable quality of having the memory of a goldfish. Maybe it’s time we ask ourselves some hard questions. Is it all worth it?
The author has been an aspirant and is a faculty for a reputed coaching institute. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
Comments
0 comment