Coaching Centres: The IAS vending machines of Delhi

Disclosure: The author teaches civil services aspirants at his institute in Delhi, apart from being a writer and correspondent for Newslaundry

There is an industrial ugliness about Mukherjee Nagar and Old Rajinder Nagar, two middle class colonies of post-partition Punjabi migrants in north and central Delhi.

The assembly line of teaching shops offering coaching for the civil services examinations somehow mirror the unattractive purposefulness of aspirants pouring in from across the country. Examination merchandise outlets are masked as book shops selling assorted class notes dictated by people who discourage reading anything except the cut-and–paste stuff more akin to a spell called swotting. Garish hoardings on lamp posts and buildings scream like amplified versions of ad space in The Hindu– a newspaper which, like all other cult followings, has an absurdly high circulation among the civil services aspirants who mostly start reading a newspaper only after they decide to take a shot at the bureaucratic gateway.

These colonies form the hubs of the multi-crore Indian Administrative Service (IAS) entrance exam coaching market in Delhi. Experts in the field put the annual revenue generated by these centres at a conservative  3000 crores, largely unaccounted and brazenly tax-evading. The commerce of middle-class aspirations that fuels this industry is spread over more than two hundred coaching centres, which relish being called institutes, offer additional services like lodging and photocopying. “Abnormally high fee charging and a cash-rich IAS coaching industry has spawned a mini-economy here. It drives demand for rooms, food, cooks, furniture, exam-study material and almost everything that you see in these markets. The influx of students from all over the country has sky-rocketed the room rents in these otherwise unremarkable places. Many landlords are dependent on rent and some have even shifted to other localities to make most of the spiralling rental income’’, said  Pradeep Chawla, a property dealer in Mukherjee Nagar.

More significantly, there are three different ways in which Mukherjee Nagar and Old Rajinder Nagar can be seen as anti-narratives to myth-building around middle-class India.

I

All the talk about a new found middle-class clamour for probity and quality has obviously not mapped these places where its selective moralising is starkly exposed by its evident love and generous patronage for mediocrity and anything that could be used as short-cut to upward mobility. These are the unimaginative breeding grounds for your future bureaucrats where they feed on cramming stuff hoping it takes them to the steel frame of public offices. And things being what they are, many actually succeed.

The anxiety for careerist escape velocity is ready to splurge lakhs as fee in coaching centres where education is reduced to robotic classnotes-gathering and pedagogy is mocked with examination code-cracking bullet points. And don’t be surprised if these are the same people who lament the lack of quality higher education in India and stage street protests when university fees go up by eighty rupees.

What they do not tell you is something fundamental to almost all their pursuits – convenience. Sometimes it can be ritualistic too.

Avinash Kumar, a law graduate, enrolled for general studies classes for the preliminary and main exam at Vajiram and Ravi, one of the largest profit- earning coaching centres in Old Rajinder Nagar. “Classes are mechanical, thinking is a sin here. It’s a ritual. I paid ninety thousand for taking dubious dictations here, it’s an expensive ritual”, he said wry glancing at the centre’s two-floor white building which looks more like a corporate office.

That’s a feeling which is not unusual for thousands flocking such centres from a cross-section of backgrounds ranging from conventional academic degrees in humanities and sciences to professional degrees in engineering, medicine and law.  “For me, it’s another set of examination drills which I have to go through. It reminds me of the mad rush for coaching when I was preparing for engineering entrance tests, the only difference is that the students are much older here” said Santosh, a civil engineering graduate from IIT-Kharagpur. Concurring with him is Nandini Bisht, a history postgraduate from Delhi University who quipped, “these classes are those two-minute noodle solutions for most of us who avoid the full meal of wholesome diet, and in the examination market, junk food has been working’’.

Such uncontested acceptance of rope-tricks of the examination scene is common and somehow tinged with convenient cynicism.

The high fee charged for classes varies across different subjects and their duration, but it is significantly defined by that blind spot of post-liberalisation consuming-class,  brand appeal. Brand building exercises include advertising faculty stardom, flaunting lists of successful students, which is often comically the same for different coaching centres and word-of-mouth publicity by students. The plot also thickens with allegations of some teachers conducting misinformation campaigns against their rivals to gain over the numbers. That obviously has also led to mutual admiration clubs and tie-ups based on commercial interests which entail teachers promoting their coterie members. Some upstart centres have even been resorting to hiring street agents to bring ‘clients’ to them for a cut.  “I get five thousand as commission for every student I manage to get enrolled in some institutes in Mukherjee Nagar” said a street agent who did not want to be named.

“It’s a herd instinct driven market. The crowds-attract-crowds syndrome is what coaching centres rely on and that’s the fight here. Once you have some numbers, it ensures you get even more students,” said Sudhir Sharma, keen on joining the growing tribe of coaching entrepreneurs in Old Rajinder Nagar.

In this number driven market, the student-teacher relationship has been replaced by a client-service provider relationship similar to that of any service sector company. Marketing, still a dirty word for pedagogy is integral to the ‘strategies’ teachers have for this industry. “Coaching centre teaching is more about showmanship, it’s an act where you can deceive students to believe in whatever rubbish you are offering. All institutes are basically in this deception business only, some are more lucky with money, some less” said Atul Garg, who once taught at Vajiram and Ravi. He started teaching after exhausting all his attempts at the civil services exam, which is also the most common profile of teachers in these centres, who often also own the centres they teach at.

Along with IAS rejects dominated faculty, the huge money to be made also attracts some retired professors and bureaucrats. Not to let this opportunity go are some university teachers too, who moonlight at coaching centres with a slightly changed name to avoid official complaints against them. Hubris is frequently used as a marketing tool by the teachers here and it is usual to come across statements like ‘I am the best’. It spills over to parallel ambitions too, as in the case of a geography teacher at Alternative Learning Systems (ALS) in Mukherjee Nagar who has modelled himself along the lines of a motivation guru delivering pompous homilies or a history teacher at Career Point in Old Rajinder Nagar who advertises his all-round teaching profile on his website comparing himself to Rabindranath Tagore.

The foot soldiers for teaching work are often ex-students. They are used as assistants by teachers at exploitative rates of payment to make lecture notes and do the tedious work of evaluating answer-sheets of practice tests. “It’s a combination of cheating, as people take these tests expecting teachers to evaluate their answers, and exploitation, as ex-students hired to do the job are paid peanuts compared with the huge fee that these teachers charge for such tests” said Shishir Tripathi who evaluated test series answer sheets of political science for a coaching centre in Old Rajinder Nagar. Some lecture notes also find their way to the numerous study material shops which have proliferated in these colonies over last few years. “We deal basically in exam study material, you may also call it exam merchandise. Nobody is interested in reading books here, they want material to mug up. It’s a recycling business, you bank on photocopying machines to keep churning out that stuff’’ said Anil Kumar of Kumar Book Centre, a chain of study material shops in these colonies.

The seedy side of financial transactions in the coaching industry, blatant tax-evasion by faculty members and the hefty fee structure have unsurprisingly not figured on middle-class activism for transparency. It doesn’t want to question the underbelly of an industry which by providing convenient escape-routes, feeds on the careerist insecurities of middle-class India in the competitive examination market. “There are too many skeletons in the financial cupboards of this industry. Its accounting practices are horribly murky. There is almost a conspiracy of silence about it because of the vested interests of the huge mediocrity which sees it as the instant facilitation cost for its career aspirations, howsoever compromised that might be” said Chandan Sarraf, a chartered accountant who was once puzzled by the stark indifference to glaring financial irregularities of the coaching industry.

Now he seems to have a word that solves the behavioural ambiguity of the patrons of this industry, hypocrisy.

II

Contrary to post-liberalisation perceptions about a remarkable shift in the career hierarchy in middle-class India, civil services in general and IAS in particular retain their pull as amongst the most sought after career destinations, symbolising a case of ossified aspirations.

According to figures released in May 2016 of the final results of the 2015 civil services examination, Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) received a record number of 9,45,908 applications for the preliminary stage of the examination. Out of these, 4.63 lakh candidates actually appeared. The figures reinforce the findings of a 2007 survey report of the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) which showed civil services as among the most preferred career choices among a cross-section of India’s youth.

Besides traditional bastions of civil service recruits in the BIMARU (though the pejorative acronym is misplaced considering the success ratio of these states in IAS exams) states in Hindi heartland and Tamil Nadu in the south, the recruitment in the last few years shows an increasingly pan-India distribution of successful candidates. This is important because it reasserts the coveted status of a job in the bureaucracy irrespective of the human development or industrial development indices of the aspirant’s domicile. The trend of specialists opting for a generalist service continues with doctors, engineers and management professionals outnumbering the candidates with conventional liberal arts and science backgrounds, in the top hundred list.

So what explains this persistent pull towards public sector jobs when the world around the young aspirants is supposedly changing fast (read private sector)?

Such unchanging sociology of career aspirations seems dictated by middle-class yearning for a secure perch of a high ranking government job which can assure instant social recognition and that feudal attraction of being part of the Mai-Baap state apparatus. Job security still remains the prime arbiter of career preferences and civil services continue to shape aspirations of the traditionally circumspect class. Also, there are young people of the making-a-difference brigade who somehow find their sense of social conscience worthy of the power and perks of a comfortable life in the civil services.

Sometimes it is simply the extension of parent’s aspirations and the clout-wielding image of civil servants that has been planted in their minds. “I was brought up to join IAS, and then I also carry that idea of doing my bit in public life’’ says Sunaina Sharma, a law graduate from National Law Institute University (NLIU), Bhopal, who is preparing for her fourth attempt. “My family sees trying for IAS as a natural move after my IIT education’’ said Suman Saurabh, a chemical engineer from IIT- Kanpur, now working at Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC).

These static frames of middle-class India’s aspirational landscape are certainly not an advertisement for the post-reforms middle-class story of exploring, dynamic and innovative people.

III

Talk about the middle class emerging as a homogeneous entity across India, with a shared worldview and social outlook needs to factor in such ideas in the context of the divide between that perception and the Mukherjee Nagar – Old Rajinder Nagar reality. This divide also has a subtext of a lingual and regional underclass living within the folds of a larger middle class and its simmering discontent against the English educated section of this class. It coincides with what distinguishes these colonies. Mukherjee Nagar is the place where a majority of Hindi medium IAS coaching centres are based while Old Rajinder Nagar is home mostly to English medium centres. After witnessing a phase of calm of almost a decade in which there was a perceived upsurge of hinterland aspirants in the recruitment to civil services coinciding with post-Mandal period, the resentment has resurfaced in the last six years in the aftermath of some changes introduced in the examination pattern by UPSC.  Such changes are viewed by Hindi and regional language candidates as favouring English medium candidates and putting the candidates from rural backgrounds at a disadvantage.

There is a sense of being wronged among the students living in Mukherjee Nagar and in other colonies that have come up on its fringes.

“We demanded three additional attempts for candidates in view of the changes brought through CSAT, and we are determined to fight for our rights and against the injustice being done to Hindi and regional language candidates,” said Abhishek Singh, a member of what was then called Fresh Attempt Fighter Group.

Amid all this, some questions go unanswered. Is a convenient pattern of civil services examination a democratic entitlement? Can question papers for a recruitment examination be democratically scrutinised?

In unsettling ways, Mukherjee Nagar and Old Rajendra Nagar reveal the other static side of middle-class India, even as its mobility is celebrated in corporate fairs and festivals across the country.