By Shubhangi Shah

On the surface, it seems business as usual in Rajasthan’s Kota, which is known as the country’s coaching factory for IIT-JEE and NEET aspirants. After a two-year hiatus, the town is buzzing again, with students huddled together, exchanging notes and rushing to classes.

But the pandemic period changed paradigms and introduced everyone to online classes. And the post-pandemic period has brought with it challenges for the offline coaching institutes. Interestingly, now instead of students, the institutes are feeling the pressure. The entrenched offline players are facing intense competition from online companies, who, in turn, after a deflated edtech model, are trying to gain a foothold in the physical space.

And, the competition is intense, to say the least. From poaching of teachers to intimidating them, to luring students with deep discounts, every trick is being employed to gain a slice of the `1,200-crore Kota coaching business pie.

As Nitin Vijay, founder and CEO of Motion, one of the big players in Kota’s coaching industry, told FE, “The business in Kota looks lucrative from outside, but it is cut-throat. We have seen several big coaching institutes, from FIITJEE to Narayana and Chaitanya, opening shop here but not succeeding.”

He is right. Allen, for one, is the largest established offline player in the area and giving it a tough competition is Unacademy, an edtech platform. While Unacademy did not reveal the number of admissions, another edtech player, Physics Wallah (PW), has already closed 16,000 admissions in two admission phases. “Our target is to teach 25,000 students in Kota this year,” said Swapnil Sharma, faculty acquisition officer at PW. Residents say the student footfall has seen an increase this year. Agrees Govind Maheshwari, director of Allen Institute, which has 22 centres across the city, “We are going to cross an all-time high number of admissions this year,” he said. Similarly, Motion’s Nitin Vijay said, “We have registered 3x growth in terms of students and expects students’ footfall in the city to increase by 20-25% compared to the pre-pandemic levels.”

The fee haggle

While traditional coaching institutes charge approximately `1.5 lakh per student with 200-250 of them in a single class, edtech firms have come up with their own models, offering discounted fee and less number of students per class.

There are some students who got admission at Unacademy for `5,000. The edtech platform came out with a scheme under which if a student enrolls at an institute and cannot get the fee refunded, it would admit them for just `5,000. “We closed this scheme last week,” said Mohit Bhargava, a former Allen teacher who joined Unacademy last month. PW had also introduced a similar scheme. Meanwhile, PW has been a major crowd puller owing to its low fees. “We are offering courses at `49,000 for classes 11 and 12, and `59,000+GST for droppers, which is the lowest ever in Kota, Sharma said, adding, “The idea is not business or to earn revenue, but to cater to students who are not financially-capable.”

Parents of a brother-sister duo we met in Kota told us they had enrolled their children at Unacademy and PW because of the lower cost. “The fee structure is such that for the cost of one, we can teach both our children,” they revealed. The son was a former Allen student.

RK Verma, managing director of Resonance, an offline coaching centre in business for over two decades, sees this as a means of customer acquisition. “The system is not feasible financially. You are basically burning your financers’ money, and ultimately results matter,” he said, while admitting “this is affecting our ecosytem and our business”. Allen’s Maheshwari also questioned the feasibility of this model. “A business cannot grow after incurring losses for a long time,” he said. Recently, Unacademy told its employees to focus on profitability amid what it termed a funding winter, besides laying off hundreds. Motion’s Vijay sums it up pretty well. “Edtechs opening shop is like ‘Kota is the shiksha ki Kashi’ and we must also have a temple here,” he said.

Poaching grounds

Commonly referred to as teachers’ poaching, the act is quite common in Kota’s cut-throat environment, where one institute ropes in faculty of another institute to deliver a blow. This happens almost overnight, and often leads to court cases. “Not just us, sometimes even students and their parents also sue teachers,” Allen’s Maheshwari said. Without taking names, Motion’s Vijay attributed it to the ‘biggest player’ which tells teachers to join instantly or say goodbye to the offer.

And, the money is big, often in crores. “No, it is not that much,” Unacademy’s Bhargava said when asked about rumours that he got an offer of `20 crore for joining the edtech startup from Allen. Meanwhile, Allen’s Maheshwari revealed that though salaries differ from person to person, some teachers even got a 5x raise on shifting.

Unacademy has also hired several top teachers from Allen. Without giving an exact figure, Allen’s director revealed that the number of teachers who left were between 35 and 42. However, he didn’t reveal if students had followed suit. A group of former Allen students preparing for IIT-JEE, however, told us their main reason for joining Unacademy was because all their teachers had shifted. Terming it a ‘mini-Allen’, they said “not just the teachers, most of those who enrolled in our phase are also from Allen”.

In all this scrambling for teachers, students are often at a loss. “It is really depressing when a teacher leaves midway,” said two students preparing for IIT-JEE at Allen Institute, adding, “It crushes our confidence.” A group of former Allen students who joined Unacademy echoed the same sentiment. “When we are taught by a teacher, we get comfortable with him. If suddenly he leaves, it takes time for us to adapt to the new teacher,” they said.

So how do institutes retain teachers? “By giving them more money,” Motion’s Vijay bluntly said.

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