New Delhi:
VK Bansal started off by tutoring children at his home and that was the inception of the Kota coaching industry as we know today. Others like Rajesh Maheshwari were also doing the same. Both of them, along with others, later, formed a number of noted Kota Coaching Institutes that are now credited to cloud the All India Ranks of Indian competitive exams.
Lockdowns imposed because of COVID-19 pandemic made a dramatic shift from offline mode of education to the online mode. The offline mode has been chipping away slowly for the last few years but the pandemic gave a sudden boost to the online classes. With almost a year already gone, there have been questions on the quality and results of online education.
Seeing it purely from an output point of view, in the recent JEE Mains 2021 results, Allen Career institute had 6 students on Rank 1 out of the total 18 students who held that rank. The unique event of having multiple first rank holders was because of COVID-19 pandemic situation where students had four opportunities to give the exam. Apart from these 6 students, there were three more Allen students reported to be in top 10 AIR.
Allen had gone from an offline mode to online in the first week of April in 2020 and retrospectively, the tutoring mechanism for the entire year remained online more or less for Allen. This boxed Allen with other online players supported by Venture Capitalist funds like Byju’s with Allen left with no Kota Advantage.
Allen has mostly relied on traditional means of operations with centers opening in various other Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities of the country and also going international by opening a center in Dubai. The Coaching institute didn’t have prior expertise in online tech and had been using it at a surface level to make the processes efficient – and was not the prime mode of operation.
Despite this, Allen gave results which were not very different from past years. Analyzing results from the past 5 years, Allen had top 2 to top 5 All India Rank (AIRs) amongst the Top 10 bracket in its fold – with highest AIRs (Top 4 out of 10) in 2016 and lowest in 2018 and 2020.
Does this mean that the Kota Hype had no value to begin with?
The fact that Byju’s or other leading Edtech platform students did not beat Allen in the last year exams give an inference that what eventually matters is the faculty and the methodology to teach that Kota has seemed to master over years.
The Kota Coaching industry was reduced to one fourth of its valuation of USD 120 Billion because of COVID-19. But Allen reports a 30 per cent increase in student enrollment in 2021 as opposed to 2020 – indicating that students still want to come to the city and the city is ready to bounce back. It is also indicating that students still have more faith in offline classes and prefer to go for that if provided an option.
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