Archive for the ‘Coaching Classes’ Category
Bigger Business Via Better Coaching
With over two lakh aspirants appearing for the Common Admissions Test (CAT) last year, it is obvious that most Indian students view a management degree as a gateway to untold riches. It is this mindset that VistaMind Education, a Bangalore-based coaching institute, aims to build on. “Where we really try to differentiate ourselves from the rest, is not just through the use of technology but through the old-fashioned methods of giving personal attention to our students and providing quality work materials,” said ARKS Srinivas who co-founded VistaMind a year ago.
Over the last decade-and-a-half, coaching establishments have become an extremely lucrative business proposition as they attempt to cash in on a 600 million-strong population aged under 35, looking to empower itself through the avenue of higher education. The market estimated at about $10 billion is however extremely fragmented.
“It’s all about reputation, word-of-mouth and results. If you can’t coach students to be amongst the top-ranked, they won’t sign up with you,” said Amitabh Jhingan, national sector leader for education at Ernst & Young.
“The problem with coaching establishments in India is that they offer general solutions to specific problems. The concept of personal mentoring just isn’t there,” Srinivas pointed out.
According to him, VistaMind offers a student-teacher ratio of 1:50, one of the lowest in the industry. Srinivas, 39, along with four other co-founders of VistaMind are graduates of the IIMs and XLRI. They were all previously a part of T.I.M.E, a leading coaching institute in the country, before deciding to set up their own shop. “There were differences in opinion with them (T.I.M.E), and we realised that our vision and growth plans were very different,” the IIM Calcutta graduate said. And it’s a move that seems to have paid off. VistaMind, which currently operates six fully-owned centres spread across Bangalore, Kolkata, Chennai, Lucknow, Kanpur and Mysore, plans to establish its presence in Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad by the end of the current fiscal. It also has a franchisee-owned centre in Nagpur.
“We hope to be in at least 15 centres by the end of the year, with a focus on the smaller cities, including Jammu and Patna, either through franchisee model, company-owned centres or through a partnership model,” Srinivas said. Earlier in the year, it also visited IIM-Kozhikode to participate in the premier MBA institute’s placement programme. The opportunities are manifold.
While official data on the size of the entrance examination coaching market is scarce, the CAT training sector by itself is estimated at about Rs. 1,000 crore (Rs. 10 billion) according to industry estimates. “The market is highly fragmented, with the organised players commanding a very small portion of it. For example, the IIT-Joint Entrance Examination market is between Rs. 3,000 (Rs. 3 billion) to 4,000 crore (Rs. 4 billion),” Srinivas said.
Given the state of the fractured market, VistaMind has not stopped at just offering coaching for MBA entrance exams. It also offers a programme called Campus Alliance, through which it offers training for recruitment examinations that job seekers have to undergo in order to get placed with a number of India’s largest information technology companies, including, Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services. Through its Campus Alliance programme, VistaMind has trained about 15,000 job-seekers. It also offers coaching for pre-university exams, the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) for those looking beyond the shores of India.
The company posted revenue of about Rs. 10 crore (Rs. 100 million) for the year ended March 2013, and expects to double that by the end of fiscal 2014. It expects to be profitable in financial year 2014-15. “We are expecting profits to be at about 30% of EBITDA by that time,” Srinivas said. VistaMind has raised Rs. 25 crore (Rs. 250 million) of angel funding, but an infusion of institutional capital will largely depend on the company’s turnover next financial year. “We don’t require that much money right now, since we are not a capital intensive business. If we meet our revenue target next year, we will consider it very strongly,” Srinivas said.
Source: The Economic Times, April 12, 2013
Coaching capital braces for a tough test
At first sight, Kota seems like only a little less glitzy version of Gurgaon, the city near New Delhi known for its gleaming glass-and-chrome office complexes, call centres, shopping malls and residential towers. Kota’s rise has nothing to do with the automobile boom led by Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, which set up its first plant in Gurgaon in the 1980s and paved the way for its transformation into a thriving corporate enclave.
This town in south-western Rajasthan, on the Delhi-Mumbai railway corridor, has been powered almost entirely by education—rather, the business of education. Numerous institutes in the town, known as India’s coaching capital, have sent countless students to some of the country’s most prestigious engineering schools.
Kota’s raison d’etre becomes evident the minute a visitor enters the town. The hoardings and banners that greet visitors don’t feature the latest Bollywood offering; they aren’t about an enticing new consumer product; what they plug are coaching schools. Indeed, the entire ecosystem of Kota—from residential facilities for out-of-town students to the mushrooming high-end showrooms—has been developed around the education business.
All this may be poised to change. A decision by the Centre to move the nation to a single entrance test for admission to engineering colleges across the country, partly to diminish the influence of coaching institutes in preparing students for admission tests, has dealt a blow to the business model of Kota.
The proposed common entrance test will be a national test that aims to reduce the demand for capitation fees that engineering institutes typically command for granting admission just as it will ease the stress on aspiring students, who otherwise have to sit for multiple entrance examinations.
Under the plan, all Central government-funded technical institutes will give 40% weightage to students’ performance in school board examinations and 60% to the scores in the entrance test. In the case of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), besides passing the entrance test, a student would also have to finish among the top 20 percentile in the school-leaving examination to qualify for admission.
While until now only the score in the engineering entrance test has mattered, it will become just one more metric in assessing a student for admission, still an important one, although the so-called one-nation, one-test initiative is still mired in confusion. The greater focus on marks in the school-leaving examinations for admission to institutes such as the IITs and the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) has led to a decline in the flow of students to Kota’s coaching schools.
The impact
Along with two dozen engineering degree aspirants, Shivam Sharma is seated on the neatly manicured lawns outside the multi-storey test preparation institute Career Point Ltd. Given that the institute claims a success rate of 70% in sending students to various engineering colleges, Sharma, who has passed his 12th class examination from Agra and came to Kota to join Career Point in July, is understandably nervous about making the cut for admission to engineering colleges.
“I have lost over a month (of preparation) because of the confusion over the entrance exam,” Sharma said with a grimace. “Several of my friends and juniors stayed back” in Agra instead of coming to Kota to join test preparation classes. The change in the requirements for admission has dimmed his chances of entering one of the IITs because Sharma scored just 66% in his class XII board exam. “Like me, many may not get a chance to crack IIT. Giving more emphasis on the board exam too has affected the decision of many to prepare for IITs while they are in the 11th standard,” he said.
Ravit Anand, another engineering degree aspirant,who came to Kota from Ghaziabad on the outskirts of Delhi to prepare for the same entrance examination, agreed. “They have created a mess out of nothing and taken away chances of many students,” Anand said. “Officials could have taken the decision gradually, allowing students to think and prepare for the change with time in hands.” Not surprisingly, the coaching business is already feeling the pinch.
Nearly 100,000 students come to Kota every year from all parts of the country to realize their ambition of entering engineering schools. Every student spends an extra Rs. 8,000-Rs. 14,000 per month to cover their cost of living. Including the coaching fee ranging between Rs. 50,000 and Rs. 85,000, a student ends up paying upwards of Rs. 200,000 a year. Put together, the annual revenue of the coaching business in Kota is roughly around Rs. 20 billion.
The top six institutes in Kota combined employ more than 5,000 people directly, including 1,200 faculty—a fifth of whom have graduated from the IITs. Almost all classrooms are equipped with the latest teaching technology and, in addition, each institute has set up problem-solving desks manned by teachers. “There is a 20% impact on the business. This is significant but it’s out of (our) control…what can you do?,” said Pramod Maheshwari, chief executive and managing director of Career Point Ltd, the first coaching centre to get listed on the stock market.
“The confusion has impacted the flow of students to Kota, especially in the engineering segment,” he said, adding that many 11th grade students were missing this year. Career Point shares have fallen about 40% since 21 February, when Union minister of human resource development Kapil Sibal first announced the single entrance test. The small-cap index of BSE Ltd has fallen nearly 10% in the same period.
Not cramming schools?
P.K. Bansal, chief executive of Bansal Classes, said the authorities in Delhi may believe that coaching centres were spoiling the standards of IITs by ensuring the selection of students with exceptional skills in memorizing lessons rather than in understanding the sciences. “But in reality, we train them so well that they go and excel. We are hardworking teachers, trying our best for making up the loss that the school system was supposed to provide. These are not cramming schools,” he said. He too conceded that there was a perceptible drop in new student arrivals this year, pegging it at 15% at his institute alone.
It is difficult to estimate either the size of the coaching business in Kota or pick the exact point at which it mushroomed into a semi-industry. Legend has it that Kota was at one time a thriving industrial hub that drew a lot of bright engineers; the boom eventually went bust and one retrenched engineer decided to start tutorial classes for aspiring engineering students—the idea clicked and set Kota on its way.
Even foreign institutes such as Etoos Academy Pvt. Ltd., the South Korean test-prep company, were unable to resist the lure of Kota. They too are feeling the pinch. Etoos Academy director Choi Young Joo said the institute had nearly 4,500 students last year; this year it is a little less than 3,500—a contraction of 25%. “It’s a policy decision and we are now devising alternative plans to capture the test-prep market beyond engineering. We are in India for long term,” said Choi.
The town has 129 registered institutes, according to the official website of Kota, though residents estimate the number could be a few times the official figure, given a large number of unregistered coaching schools.
The future
The big question is whether the blow to the coaching capital of India is temporary or permanent. Analysts say the boom days may be over, but coaching classes will continue to have a market unless the government succeeds in reducing the shortcomings in the formal education system. CEO Maheshwari of Career Point, for instance, says the fact that students’ parents are willing to pay for coaching classes on top of the fees they already pay to their regular schools shows “nobody is relying on the school system”.
“The coaching institutes’ existence is an outcome of inefficiency and failure of school system,” he said. “Unfortunately, the government is not accepting this…instead they are blaming the coaching industry.” Shilpa Danodia, a student from Sikar in Rajasthan, says: “You have to improve your standard and an entrance as tough as IIT-JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) or AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Examination) needs serious preparation and hand-holding.” Danodia is enrolled at Resonance Eduventures Pvt. Ltd. in Kota.
Which then begets the question as to whether in the interim the change in rules will actually work to the detriment of students based outside of the main metros. While they will not be able to access coaching hubs such as Kota for the usual duration, an alternative coaching infrastructure will take time to emerge locally in other small cities and towns.
Vinod Raina, a member of the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE), a body that advises the government in policy making, says a reduction in the number of high-stakes entrance tests will reduce the demand for coaching institutes. “Parents fear that unless their kids get coached, they won’t be able to compete. …The reasons are many but coaching is a complete nuisance and should be made illegal,” he said.
Source: Mint, September 10, 2012
Coaching firms now set eyes on ISEET pie
The government wants to check the booming coaching class business with a single test to replace multiple engineering tests. Bring it on, says the Rs. 23,000-crore (Rs. 230 billion) industry. A day after the Indian Science Engineering Eligibility Test (ISEET) was announced, the homepage of Career Point, a coaching institute based in Rajasthan’s Kota, the hub of training institutes in the country said: “Welcome ISEET 2013. Being a pioneer in adopting all changes in IIT-JEE and AIEEE, Career Point proudly announces admission for the ISEET course.”
The ISEET, expected to roll out next year, will eliminate India’s two largest engineering entrance tests — the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) and the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE). Institutes are quickly adapting to the upcoming regime, which was designed in part to check their rampant growth. India, which has a Rs. 1.8-trillion education and training market, produced 800,000 engineers last year.
“We expect more students because of the gap between school teaching and competition, which is the application of concepts which needs practice. However, now, students will have to appear for the aptitude test besides the advanced learning test,” said RL Trikha, Director, FIIT JEE, the largest player in the engineering coaching business. Over 20,000 students have signed up at the institute this year, with the number of candidates growing 10-15% every year.
ISEET will test comprehension, critical thinking and logical reasoning, along with problem-solving ability in basic science subjects. The two tests will together indicate a candidate’s scholastic level and aptitude for science and engineering and give 40% weight to class 12 Board exams. This means coaching centres will have to expand their curricula to include school syllabus – something which FIIT JEE offers in its two-year integrated school programme called Pinnacle. “In the last three years, a large number of candidates is common to IIT-JEE and AIEEE rank lists. The ISEET, which allocates weight to marks in class 12 exams will help students focus on academics,” said Satya Narayanan, Chairman, CL Educate (previously Career Launcher).
Brilliant Tutorials is the platform partner for CL. While the bulk of Brilliant’s 40,000 students are IIT aspirants, 8,500 out of 100,000 CL students are engineering aspirants. The industry feels the coaching class business will continue to thrive. “Coaching classes are related to the aspirations of students and there will be fierce competition for the remaining 60%, after the 40% weight to school exams. The government may not be completely successful in controlling the business,” noted Shalini Sharma, Head, Higher Education at the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).
CL’s Narayanan said with the new test, there will be no escaping the school syllabus. His institute will start offering coaching in school curricula soon. “As long as such competitive exams remain and the number of students increase, they will always need extra coaching to perform better than others. We have been changing our coaching in line with the changing patterns of engineering exams and aptitude training is something we impart to all our students,” said Ajay Antony, Course Director, IIT-JEE exam at Triumphant Institute of Management Education (T.I.M.E.). However, coaching institutes are divided on the issue of fees. While Antony says there could be a 10-15% increase, others say fees might decline.
Source: The Financial Express, February 27, 2012
Criticized for falling standards, IITs tweak JEE format
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have tweaked the format of next year’s joint entrance examination (JEE) after being criticized for falling standards by Infosys Ltd. Chairman Emeritus N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Aspirants for a place in India’s elite engineering schools will now have to score minimum marks in each of three subjects they are tested in — physics, chemistry and mathematics — as well as a minimum aggregate to be considered for admission, the institutes said in a statement on Wednesday.
The IIT-JEE is one of the most competitive examinations in the country, with just two of every 100 candidates qualifying for admission to the 15 IITs. But Murthy, an IIT alumnus himself, said on 3 October that IIT graduates fare poorly in jobs and overseas colleges. He blamed the entrance process and admission coaching centres, which he said prepare candidates through rote learning, for the drop in standards.
Currently, students are ranked on a merit list based on overall marks. Coaching centres often encourage students to focus on any two subjects of their choice, as even students who are weak in one subject can make the grade. But such students come under pressure once they get admitted, as well as later in their careers. “Obtaining a rank in IIT-JEE 2012 does not guarantee admission to any of the courses available in IITs, IT-BHU and ISM, Dhanbad,” said IIT Delhi, which is organizing next year’s examination. Besides the 15 IITs, the Information Technology Department of Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU) and Indian School of Mines (ISM), Dhanbad also select students from JEE.
Under the new format, candidates must score at least 10% in each subject and 35% overall to be considered for the merit list. Separate rank lists will be prepared for students from other backward classes (OBCs), scheduled castes and scheduled tribes as well as for disabled students — but on the same principle. For example, an OBC student must score at least 9% in each subject and 31.5% aggregate to be on the OBC rank list.
“For the first time, we are making the cut-off list public even before the entrance. The predefined cut-off will be made public through the admission brochures,” said S.K. Chowdhury, chairman of the JEE committee at IIT-Kanpur. The move will give equal weight to every subject, said a professor at IIT-Delhi. “We have seen visible disparity in the scoring pattern of many students. The effect of coaching centres can be reduced now,” the professor added, requesting anonymity.
Some 485,000 students took the JEE in the last academic year, vying for around 10,000 seats. The next examination will be conducted on 8 April, 2012.
The change may also help ensure no seats are left vacant, especially in the reserved categories. “Around 300 seats go vacant every year and we hope this change will also fill up these seats,” said Chowdhury of IIT-Kanpur. Gaurav Mittal, who runs DMC Tutorials and Quest coaching centres, said the change in JEE format won’t have much bearing on the way they approach preparing students. “They are attacking the false perception that coaching is a must for entering IIT,” he added.
Source: Mint, October 20, 2011
Narayana Murthy’s IIT comment stirs up debate among academicians
Are coaching institutes to blame for poor quality of IIT students? Somewhat, says the industry, but blames other factors, like education system, too. An entry into the coveted Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) got a snub on Monday from the Infosys Chairman Emeritus N.R. Narayana Murthy. He said at a ‘Pan IIT’ summit in New York that the quality of students entering IITs has deteriorated over the years due to coaching classes that prepare engineering aspirants.
The quality of students and their employability has been a cause of concern for the industry. “There has not been any change in the quality of students either for the better or worse. The same hiring and selection process is applied for all engineering colleges and the IIT students do not need any lesser time for training compared to a non-IITian and after training productivity is same as others,” says Manjunath SR, Senior Director, Human Resources, NetApp India, The company takes 50-60 students from IITs every year and has been doing this for the past four years.
Ganesh Shermon, People Practice Head for KPMG, has seen a drop in the quality because now students are tested for admissions only on 2-3 subjects and on questions that can be cracked through sheer practice. Som Mittal, an IITian and Nasscom President, says, “Murthy’s issue is perhaps about expectations. Even today IITs will probably be producing best in class, but are they at the same level as earlier?” Over the years both in terms of size and volume, IITs have expanded. The standards at IITs are very high. JEE was a great filter, but is today dominated by the coaching classes. “This is not criticism, but a time to look at what we need to do to maintain the standards in the future,” Mittal adds.
Some like Dhananjay Bansod, chief people officer of Deloitte, blame the education system. “I empathise with Murthy on the coaching bit, but the fault lies with the entire education system. Our education system is far slower to change compared to changing industry needs,” says Bansod. Deloitte visits all top IITs including Delhi, Kanpur, Bombay and Madras for campus recruitment. The fault, according to him, lies in the selection process that tests quantitative skills. “You need both quantitative and qualitative skills to make it work at the workplace,” he says. Every year more than half-a-million students sit for joint entrance examination for admission to IITs and only 10,000 get into IITs.
IIT Kanpur Director Sanjay Dhande agrees things are amiss. “The IIT education model has to get more liberalised and the curriculum needs to get revised but in education the changes are slow. The core courses have to be far more liberal than what we are doing right now and it has to be more broadbased like a major and a minor subject all together,” he says.
The need to overhaul the admission process has already been announced and there is a task force a that will be looking to include the consistency in school boards examinations and have an aptitude test as well, says IIT Madras Director Bhaskar Ramamurthi. There has been a tendancy to ignore school board results that includes languages which will be changed.
S. Sadagopan, founder Director of IIIT, Bangalore, vouches for lack of enthusiasm among the students. “Coaching starts when students are in class 9. By the time students make it to the IIT, their enthusiasm goes down. There has to be more imaginative scheme for admission than just a score.”
Coaching institutes, for their part, are upset with Murthy’s statement. Says Satya Narayanan R., founder chairman of Delhi-based coaching institute Career Launcher, “I find the statement a little disappointing. Mr. N.R. Narayana Murthy is simplifying the problem of employability. Coaching institutes are doing their job. If someone wants to get into an IIT, somebody has to train them.”
According to him, the problem is multifarious. “We need to make the education system more student-centric. The school is focused on finishing the curriculum,” he says. Defending coaching methods, Pramod Kumar Bansal, CEO of Bansal Classes, says: “We teach the students keeping in mind the vast IIT syllabus. Coaching centres help students understand the routine and give them a systematic approach to crack the exams.” The institute is training 14,000 students for JEE in Kota and Jaipur.
Anand Kumar, Founder member of Super 30, an institute in Bihar that has had a success rate of 80% to 100% in terms of its students clearing the exam, blames professors. “Our students are capable enough. Those who set the questions should be questioned as to why they did not set a paper that will bring in the best. IIT professors should then be blamed and not coaching institutes,” says Kumar.
Source: The Economic Times, October 5, 2011
>Tuitions often costlier than fees: 27% urban students spend on coaching
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Private coaching constitutes a significantly large portion of the expense students incur on education, sometimes even bigger than the expenditure on school fees, a study says. In Gujarat, Maharashtra and Karnataka, school students who go for tuitions spend more on private coaching than the average school student does on all items including school fees, transport, books and stationary and uniforms.
These are the findings of a in 2007-08 National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) study on participation and expenditure on education by people aged between 5 and 29. Among the larger states, West Bengal records the highest proportion of education expenditure on private coaching, about 40%. This is when the total amount spent on education is averaged across all students irrespective of whether they take private coaching or not. No other component of school education in West Bengal constitutes as big a chunk of the total expenditure as private coaching. In urban West Bengal, the spending on private coaching is as high as 48% of the education expenses.
Other big states that spend a considerable share on private tutoring are Bihar (21%), Orissa (20%), Gujarat (20%), Maharashtra (16%) and Jharkhand (15%). In most of these states, including West Bengal, school fees are quite low. The exception is Maharashtra, where it is rather high, about 38%, comprising the biggest chunk of average money spent on education in a state per student annually. In Bihar and Orissa, rural students seem to be spending a much larger share on private tuitions than their urban counterparts, 24% in rural areas against 18% in urban Bihar and 28% in rural Orissa vis-a-vis 16% in urban areas. This could be because most rural students in these states attend government schools where fees are quite low. The states accounting for the smallest proportion on private coaching are Andhra Pradesh (3%), Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh, 4% each. There is little difference in the pattern between rural and urban areas in these states.
The average yearly spending by rural school students who took private coaching was less than half of what was spent by their urban counterparts. In Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh even rural students spent well over 60% of what the urban students paid for private coaching.
The greatest difference between what rural students and their urban counterpart spent on private tuition was in West Bengal. The urban spending on private tuition averaged Rs. 3,485 a year per student, among the highest in the country. In the rural areas, it was a meager Rs. 377, the lowest average rural spending on private coaching in the entire country.
Source: The Times of India, January 27, 2011
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.
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.
Source: The Times of India, December 30, 2010
Poor man’s IIT coach in Time’s "Best of Asia" list
“Super 30”, the Patna-based institute which has been coaching poor students for IITs, has found a place in Time magazine’s list of Best of Asia 2010.T ime magazine has described Super 30 as the “Best Cram School” in its list. Last year, 30 of them came from one coaching centre in Patna, capital of the impoverished north Indian state of Bihar. That may not seem like many, but for the Super 30 centre its a pass rate of 100%, the magazine said in its latest issue. What makes that feat even more remarkable is that these students are the poorest of the poor, who would otherwise never be able to afford full-time coaching, it added. The institutes director-cum-founder Anand Kumar was thrilled by the latest recognition showered on his efforts. A student enrolled in Super 30 gets full scholarships, including accommodation and food.
Time magazine said the project has even won the notice of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who met Mr. Kumar in February to hear his plan to launch a national programme for talented rural children. In a country that has struggled to offer those students even basic education, Super 30 is an example of what’s possible when human potential is tapped, the magazine said. The institute was started by Mr. Kumar along with Bihar’s Additional Director-General of Police Abhayanand in 2002 in Patna. But two years ago, Abhayanand dissociated himself from the institute.
Source: The Economic Times, May 15, 2010
Poor man’s IIT coach in Time’s "Best of Asia" list
“Super 30”, the Patna-based institute which has been coaching poor students for IITs, has found a place in Time magazine’s list of Best of Asia 2010.T ime magazine has described Super 30 as the “Best Cram School” in its list. Last year, 30 of them came from one coaching centre in Patna, capital of the impoverished north Indian state of Bihar. That may not seem like many, but for the Super 30 centre its a pass rate of 100%, the magazine said in its latest issue. What makes that feat even more remarkable is that these students are the poorest of the poor, who would otherwise never be able to afford full-time coaching, it added. The institutes director-cum-founder Anand Kumar was thrilled by the latest recognition showered on his efforts. A student enrolled in Super 30 gets full scholarships, including accommodation and food.
Time magazine said the project has even won the notice of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who met Mr. Kumar in February to hear his plan to launch a national programme for talented rural children. In a country that has struggled to offer those students even basic education, Super 30 is an example of what’s possible when human potential is tapped, the magazine said. The institute was started by Mr. Kumar along with Bihar’s Additional Director-General of Police Abhayanand in 2002 in Patna. But two years ago, Abhayanand dissociated himself from the institute.
Source: The Economic Times, May 15, 2010
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