Every year, lakhs of students go to Kota, a city in Rajasthan, with a dream. A dream of being tutored at the best coaching institutes there and, thereafter, crack the competitive exam for entrance to the best engineering or medical colleges of India.

But what becomes of the dream after? Shakeel Ridwan Karim, 21, could not make it to the IIT league, but he considers his Kota chapter as the game-changer. Says the student of civil engineering at Aligarh Muslim University, “I couldn’t excel in studies, though I got into a decent college, but that doesn’t mean studying at Kota was a waste of time. It gave me extremely useful life lessons.”

According to Shakeel, at Kota, one is either a poster boy or just another face in the crowd. He says, “Either you are the successful one or you are the guy who is slowly descending into the depths of failure. Maybe you aren’t a failure in the strictest sense of the term, but society labels you thus.”

And it is this fear of a label that overwhelms students and drives them to extremes, the original point of the shift quite lost.

There is no denying that for some time now Kota is synonymous with student suicides. In 2018, reportedly 19 students committed suicide; seven in 2017; and 17 in 2016. “It’s not because of bad scores in the JEE Mains... It’s because I’ve started hating myself to the extent that I want to kill myself,” wrote 17-year-old Kriti Tripathi in a note before jumping to her death from a five-storey building this April. She had reportedly urged the government to shut down coaching institutes at the soonest. “They suck,” she wrote.

Ankit Shaw of Calcutta went to Kota after clearing his Class XII boards. He prepared for the IIT-JEE (Indian Institutes of Technology Joint Entrance Examination). He says, “Kota has a very systematic way of teaching. I was in batch 13 — the batch of gap-year students. Batches change every two to three months. If you do not perform well, not only do you not get a better batch, but also face family pressure. The result of every exam is sent to parents.”

Ankit talks about a frenzied pace of teaching, the trouble in keeping up, revising. He says, “I missed having someone I could speak to, who would understand why my performance was deteriorating. But then I think even if I had someone, I wouldn't have had the time to talk.”

Suvam Poddar was in Kota for two years to prepare for the NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test). He says, “If a student has failed or taken that extreme step of committing suicide, the institutes are blamed. But it is you [the student or his or her family] who is seeking admission, agreeing to pay the hefty amount to the institutes. They aren’t the ones forcing you to do so.”

Suvam is not the only one who feels this way. Shakeel, too, says that if anything is to be blamed it is the larger education system in the country. Both Suvam and Shakeel feel blaming the place is unfair and list other reasons of failure — peer issues, smartphone addiction, difficulty in adjusting to hostel or paying guest accomodation diet.

During Suvam’s time there, someone he knew committed suicide in his hostel. Recalling that time he says, “Leaving the personal matters of individuals, it’s mainly because of fear and insecurity. External pressure doesn’t let the student breathe properly and somehow he or she falls into the trap of giving up.” Ankit says Kota has toughened him. “It taught me how to go ahead in life, without anyone’s support. Kota teaches one how to function under pressure and, most importantly, it teaches one how to survive.”

Not everyone who passes through Kota and succesfully at that look back with fondness or appreciation. In fact, Shristi Agarwal, who bagged a seat in IIT Kharagpur post Kota, has a caveat for parents. She says, “While the quality of education in Kota institutions is one of the finest in the country, the negatives surrounding the place often override the positives to a point where it may all become toxic. I remember one of my batchmates who was enrolled in a programme that helped students start early, right after primary school. That is the kind of marketing they’ve managed to pull off, the kind of thing parents should understand and stay away from.”

And then not every road to success passes through Kota. Ritesh Kumar Singh, 24, went there after his Plus Two hoping to realise his true potential. He says, “Somewhere along the way I lost my path and it didn’t turn out to be of much help. There was no one to guide me.” Singh is now working in Larsen & Toubro Infotech as a software developer. From all these testimonies one thing is clear — one must weigh the pros and cons before packing the bags for Kota.

‘Kota is not harsh, the competition is’

Kota Factory is a recent Web-series by The Viral Fever (TVF). It captures the life of IIT and medical aspirants as they face both competition and life. The episodes — Inventory, Assembly Line, Optimisation, Shutdown, Overhaul — throw light on what Kota does to its students. The maker of the series, Saurabh Khanna, talks to The Telegraph.

Khanna is a Kota factory product and an IIT Kanpur graduate. He says, “It was a subject we had in mind for years because most core team members have studied there.”

He points out that the series is India’s first black- and-white one. But why? According to Khanna, though the effect is used popularly for period dramas or flashbacks, in this series it is employed to portray a world of stark binaries. He says, “Kota is not harsh, the competition is. The characters were much thought through.” For instance, there is the bright Meena, who is from an underprivileged background and is devoted to books. Then there is Uday, who is intelligent but much too carefree, smoking and partying. Shivangi, Uday’s live-in girlfriend, is representative of the female population in the city — outnumbered by the males, yet significant. Finally, there is Vaibhav, who is the protagonist. Says Khanna, “He is an average guy, who wants to study but he struggles. He is not a genius and he is unable to sit for six hours at a stretch.”

Khanna says he consciously didn’t want the protagonist to be someone who wanted to do photography but ends up doing engineering. “Vaibhav wants to study but does not know how to. And it is difficult when you compete with the world for the first time.”

The monologues in this Web-series sum up the essence of Kota. But the greater aim is to focus on problems such as exam fear that will not let even a good student solve papers, ace an exam. Khanna says, “If you ask me why people go to Kota, I’d say it is for the training and the teachers.”