By Arpit Srivastava:
Today morning, when I opened up the daily newspaper (yes… I am part of the minority of urban youth who still can’t resist not reading those obsolete, “tree-killing” things daily), I was in for a surprise.
The headlines blared,”Government Allows IIT Coaching Centres to turn into Junior Colleges”.
Just great.
My mind went back to those tiresome days, more than a year back, when along with the rest of the troupe, I used to, every day, rush after about 6 hours of school, to reach the IIT-JEE coaching classes – these “institutions”, which were apparently the best and surest ways of entering the hallowed portals of the IITs, by intensively teaching “tricks” to the students, which can help them answer questions in the paper. And, of course, many of the students reverently used to accept the words of these ”gurus”, thinking – “Hey, why even bother to understand the basics, when I can do what Sir says, and just memorize the formulae and solve as many questions from each and every book, to get through IIT-JEE?”
The day after the declaration of results, of course, these coaching classes release lists of all their students (mostly, not all of them were REALLY their students – atleast not before a very recent money transaction), labeling all the qualified as “Winners”, in hopes of alluring more students into shelling huge amounts of money, while the rest of the aspirants wallow in self pity for their failure to crack one exam in their life, with a few even attempting to end their lives.
Educational values re-invented indeed.
So, now these coaching classes will also start running their own junior colleges?
Couldn’t be better, some might think. No need to run around from one place to another. We’ll also save money. Right.
Though these coaching classes, might be running these colleges, they don’t seem to be planning to provide a combined “college-cum-IIT-coaching” programme at discounted rates.
The colleges will teach the normal Higher Secondary Board syllabus.
So, there’s a loop-hole,as usual – obviously. For the IIT-JEE coaching, the students will still have to shell out the same fees as other students.
More than one family is sure to be lured into putting their wards into these colleges, in the hopes that it will some how, further cement the chances of their ward cracking the IIT-JEE and entering those hallowed’ IIT portals, and will shell out the ridiculously high fees of Rs.50,000 per year of junior college, apart from the even more ridiculous two lakh Rupees, which the students will pay for their JEE coaching.
Indeed, this Mumbai-based coaching class has played a very nice strategy for further monetizing on the JEE craze.
I can only suppose, that the next possible step ahead would lead to another blaring headline –
“IIT-JEE Coaching Classes Open Own Engineering Institute” – for all their students who could not qualify.
I doubt if this would take very long to reach the headlines of my daily newspaper. Really.
I expect to see it very soon in the near future. If you don’t believe me, just wait till the day it happens. Then I can be all smug and proud, and you can congratulate me by dropping a comment here, for being the first to correctly predict the future. 🙂
With the annually recurring admissions tiff between the ICSE board and the Maharashtra State Education department, and now this surprising development, one thing’s for sure – the Higher Secondary education scene in Mumbai is indeed like a soap opera, with twists and turns in the story (which is unlikely to end soon) being churned out to the unsuspecting common man.
Drama Queen, Ekta Kapoor could certainly take a few ideas and turn this into a 10-year running sitcom, which is sure to be a HUGE success (believe me) among housewives as well as school children.
So, sit back and enjoy the never-ending saga, that India’s Educational System is.
(Don’t forget your popcorn! 😀 )