COVID lull over, students throng coaching capital

As online classes dip, edtech firms too set up shop in Kota

From shopkeepers and au­torickshaw drivers to the managers of hostels, al­most everyone in Kota says the same thing: “This is the first time I have seen so ma­ny students in this city.”

As the “coaching center city” in Rajasthan wel­comes tens of thousands of students after two years of a lull forced by the CO­VID­19 pandemic, posters exhorting “#ReviveKota” dot the landscape. The Tal­wandi area, where most of the centers are housed, is bustling with eager­looking students waiting to start the grueling preparation for medical or engineering entrance tests.

Around two lakh stu­dents joined coaching classes in Kota annually before the pandemic; this year, an additional 75,000 to one lakh students are es­timated to have made their way here. Some institutes are reporting a doubling or tripling in the number of admissions when com­pared with pre­pandemic levels.

                                   

 Nitin Vijay, founder, and CEO of Motion Education, one of the biggest coaching entries here, said that for this “new [bigger] market”, ed­tech companies like Un­academy and Physicswal­lah, who have opened their first physical coaching centers in Kota this year, can take partial credit. His center has also seen its classrooms swell by three times when compared with 2019, Mr. Vijay said.

 

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While ed­tech compa­nies were flourishing dur­ing the pandemic in the on­line mode, the smaller in­person coaching centers in Kota struggled to survive the shift, he added. Now, with in­person classes back, ed­tech companies

 

like Unacademy and Phys­icswallah are admitting stu­dents to their new physical centers in Kota to survive the drop in demand for on­line coaching.

“A number of the stu­dents at the new centers had stuck with the ed­tech companies for online les­sons through the pandemic but now want to benefit from physical classrooms for the final stretch of prep­aration,” said Nilay Kumar Ray, 19, who hails from West Bengal, and was wait­ing for the completion of his admission paperwork to the newly opened Phys­icswallah JEE coaching center.