Free coaching is not the fix, Mr PM

In his Independence Day address from the ramparts of Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi made an announcement that the government would use India’s digital public infrastructure, good teachers and technology to build an extensive network offering free online coaching for examinations to ease the financial burden on poor families with talented children who cannot afford to spend lakhs on coaching.

Free access to good teachers and reliable material can certainly reduce inequality. But the announcement begs an important question: why has coaching become so indispensable in the first place?

In India, the bottled-water business and the coaching industry tell similar stories. When public systems fail to provide services of adequate quality and reliability, private industry moves into the gap. Families buy drinking water because they do not trust what comes out of the tap. They buy coaching classes because they cannot count on regular classes as adequate preparation for their children to pass through the gateways to higher education and employment.

There are, of course, other reasons for private tuition. But its extraordinary salience in India cannot be separated from weaknesses in the formal education system.

The numbers are revealing. According to the 2025 National Sample Survey cited in a recent India Forum article by Rahul Verma, 27 per cent of school-going children take private coaching. At the senior secondary level, the figure rises to 37 per cent.

Meanwhile, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) continues to document serious deficiencies in foundational learning. In 2024, only 44.8 per cent of Class 5 children in government schools could read a Class 2 text, and fewer than one-third could do basic division. We therefore have a peculiar situation where weak foundational learning coexists with an increasingly sophisticated industry devoted to cracking examinations.

The phenomenon of ‘dummy schools’ takes this contradiction further. Students remain officially enrolled in schools but spend most of their time in coaching classes for JEE or NEET. The schoolroom becomes incidental and the coaching centre becomes the real place of study. Students may spend eight to fifteen hours preparing for NEET but still struggle with elementary biology practicals.

Speed, pattern recognition and familiarity with examination formats has not necessarily produced deeper understanding of basics.

Another driver is the scarcity of seats. This year, more than 16 lakh unique candidates registered for JEE Main. Only the top 2.5 lakh become eligible to proceed to JEE Advanced, from which a much smaller fraction ultimately enters the IITs. Similar bottlenecks exist for elite universities, medical colleges and, most dramatically, government jobs.

When a small number of prized opportunities has to be distributed among millions of aspirants, the examination ceases to be merely a test of knowledge. It becomes a mechanism for rationing opportunity; a means of mass elimination.

Spending twice as much on coaching does not mean twice as many IIT seats or government posts. Each family is rational in its desire to improve its child’s relative position. Collectively, however, enormous amounts of money, time and youthful energy are spent — dare we say, wasted — just trying to get ahead in the queue.

This is also why examination integrity is so crucial. When a single examination can make or break a career, its credibility becomes a public good. A candidate may accept odds of one in fifty or even one in a hundred if convinced that everyone faces the same examination under the same rules. A paper leak destroys that compact. India has experienced enough such episodes.

There is another distortion. The need to process millions of candidates favours standardised, easily machine-graded tests, especially multiple-choice questions. Such testing can be objective, scalable and less vulnerable to individual discretion.

With a high-stakes examination dominating a student’s future, teaching is rewired as test preparation. Knowledge reduced to pattern recognition. Learning gets mistaken for the ability to eliminate three out of four choices — quickly.

The National Education Policy (NEP) of 2020 claimed to mark the shift towards competency and conceptual understanding. Yet the underlying problems remain. As the India Forum analysis puts it, when institutional capacity does not expand alongside aspirations, entrance examinations become the organising principle of secondary education rather than merely its terminal assessment.

Governments themselves have become participants in the coaching rat-race. Maharashtra’s State Institute for Administrative Careers provides free full-time UPSC coaching. Other states have similar programmes, as does the Centre. Free coaching for socially-disadvantaged meritorious students can be a useful short-term equaliser. But it is essentially a corrective for an unequal competition, not a cure for the system that produces it.

Coaching is not uniquely Indian. Japan and South Korea have had formidable cram-school cultures despite much stronger school systems. Japan continues to perform well above the OECD average in mathematics, reading and science. In other words, intense coaching can simply be a function of fierce competition for elite institutions.

At the other end of the spectrum, Finland puts far less emphasis on national high-stakes testing, while Germany provides respected vocational and apprenticeship pathways alongside university education. The lesson is not that good public schooling makes coaching disappear. It is that young people need multiple credible pathways to education, skills, dignity and employment.

That is where the real reform agenda lies. Strengthen ordinary schools and universities. Expand the supply of good institutions rather than merely their number. Ensure that exams test understanding rather than coaching proficiency, and reduce the life-or-death importance of an afternoon’s performance. Give vocational and technical education the status they deserve. Above all, create many more attractive and secure employment opportunities so that millions of young Indians are not stampeding towards a minuscule number of government posts.

India’s digital infrastructure can certainly deliver free coaching to millions. But an even greater achievement would be to build an education and employment system in which families no longer feel compelled to buy coaching lessons in the first place.

Ajit Ranade is a noted economist. More of his writing here

Article courtesy: The Billion Press