Every year, 900,000 students looking to crack the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and other top engineering exams, make a beeline for the top coaching institutes in the country. But the competition to get into them is just as much a rat race.
Institutes like Aakash, FIITJEE, Allen, or the numerous coaching factories clustered in the college town of Kota, Rajasthan, charge anywhere between Rs 1-4 lakh ($1,400-5,600) for their services annually. And there aren’t enough seats to go around.
The market size of this mammoth industry was expected to surpass $40 billion by 2015, growing 35% year-on-year between 2012 and 2016, according to a survey by industry body ASSOCHAM.