IIT-JEE coaching pioneer to down shutters after 57 years

A Mumbai-based institution has decided to slip quietly into history. Agrawal Classes, that large blue neonlit sign seen from the Dadar flyover, will turn its lights off as the coaching institute has decided to down its shutters after sharpening a million minds for 57 years. G. D. Agrawal, who started tutoring children in maths at his Matunga home, is today in his eighth decade, with none of his heirs ready to carry on with his dream of teaching science. “We are no longer taking students. We have decided to shut down the class. It’s the final decision that the owner has taken,” the woman at the admissions counter said on Wednesday.

So, many of its alumni, including Nadir B. Godrej (1969) of Godrej Industries, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani (1975), Mahendra Choksi (1960) and Ashwin Dani (1961) of Asian Paints and Phaneesh Murthy (1980) of iGate Global Solutions, will, while passing through Dadar, be greeted by the blank facade of Harganga Mahalthe building they once went to every morning to learn the fundamentals of science.

After the initial eight years, Agrawal moved out of his home to a place in Dadar TT, then the heart of Bombay, and soon expanded his menu of courses to include physics, chemistry and English. In 1962, its first year of coaching students preparing to get into the IITs, V. D. Hattangadi bagged the all India rank 1, the news making Agrawal Classes the top destination for engineering aspirants in the country. The tagline, “Ideal for Scholars” said it all the class admitted only top rankers and promised to make them even better. Go-getters would come to the city just to be coached at Agrawal. “If you made it to Agrawal, you knew you had made it,” said an old student. While the number of students it admitted went up every year, the values that Agrawal started will never change.

Source: The Times of India, December 30, 2010

In coaching heartland Kota, competition is for faculty

Over 20 years ago, V. K. Bansal, an engineer who suffered from muscular dystrophy, began the first IIT-JEE coaching institution in Kota, pioneering the coaching class boom in this sleepy town in Rajasthan. Virtually all coaching classes in Kota, including the popular “Resonance”, were started by former faculty at Bansal Classes. And now, seven teachers from Resonance, including three heads of department (HoDs), have formed a brand new coaching class called “Rise”. A number of students enrolled in Resonance have shifted to Rise. There has been a great deal of bad blood with each institution accusing the other of treachery.

Two months ago, the three HoDs, who are now with Rise, informed the management at Resonance of their intention to start their own coaching institution after the current academic session got over in February as they didn’t want students to suffer from the split. Suddenly, at a meeting on Saturday, faculty at Resonance was informed that these three HoDs were no longer with the institution. “We were all really shocked by the move. All seven of us (three HODs and four teachers) quit and formed Rise the very next day,” said Amay Pandey, a former chemistry teacher at Resonance, who is now with Rise. According to Pandey, the moment students got to know of this, there was an uproar at Resonance, with 1000 students making the switch from Resonance to Rise within a few hours. “We closed admission to Rise on Monday night,” said Pandey.

Manoj Sharma, Vice President, Operations and Business Development at Resonance, has a completely different version of the events that unfolded over the Christmas weekend. For starters, he disputes the figures. Only 100-150 students have left us for the new class. We have seen a mere 2-3 % drop in attendance,” said Sharma. As for sacking the faculty mid-session, Sharma said this was because they were openly recruiting both students and staff from Resonance for the new coaching class while on the rolls of Resonancea claim the Rise team has vehemently denied. “They are at liberty to start their own class, but they should not do this at our expense. There was no need to discuss their plans with students and teachers,” said Sharma.

Source: The Times of India, December 30, 2010