Cram schools boom widens class divide in India

But the institution, now a landmark in Kota, a city in the desert state of Rajasthan, is neither a school nor a college. It is the jewel in the crown of India’s private coaching industry, a $6.4 billion business that exacerbates the social divide.

Cram schools have become a magnet for tens of thousands of mostly middle class families in a country where two decades of rapid economic growth have failed to improve a dysfunctional state education system and a shortage of good universities.

Such cram schools coach students for fiercely competitive entrance tests to a handful of premier technical and medical colleges. Their modus operandi is rote learning. At Bansal’s, hundreds of teenagers are trained intensively to solve complex multiple-choice questions on physics, chemistry or mathematics.

Yash Raj Mishra, a Kota cram student, lives in a tiny room with no television or laptop and spends almost 16 hours a day attending classes, revising or tackling question papers. “Physics is my first and last girlfriend,” said Mishra, leaning against a wall plastered with notes on Kinematics.

“I feel bad and frustrated when my friends score even slightly better than I do,” added the 17-year-old, who calls his friends only to ask about their academic progress.

 Two-year coaching programs in Kota cost $3,000-$4,000, in addition to which students have to pay for their regular schools and spend at least $2,000 a year on accommodation. That makes the total expenditure a small fortune for most in a nation where the annual per capita income is around $1,250.

“A child is a stack of thousand-rupee notes,” said Manoj Chauhan, a mathematics tutor in his late 20s who could have joined a software company or multinational but chose instead to teach in Kota, where many teachers’ salaries top $6,000 a month.

Such cram schools compound the inequalities of an education system plagued by absentee teachers and high drop-out rates, which have left a quarter of Indians illiterate and lacking the skills to match the country’s growing economic needs.

A global survey by ManpowerGroup, one of the world’s largest staffing service providers,  estimated India’s shortage of skilled labor at 67 percent -- the second worst in the world. The skill shortages threaten to blunt what is seen as one of India’s biggest economic advantages - its demographic dividend.

With 60 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population under the age of 35, the country has an opportunity to reap the kind of demographic dividend that brought the dramatic transformation of East Asian economies towards the end of the 20th century.

The average age of an Indian in 2020 will be 29 compared with 37 in China and the United States and 48 in Japan, bringing a chance to boost productivity and the savings rate. But India may never realize its dividend if the bulk of these youths are poorly educated, stuck in low-value jobs or under-employed.