Every year more than lakhs of students appear for entrance exams for engineering and medical institutions. Education system which should nurture aptitude of students for diverse fields is a complete failure. This gap between deliverables of educational system and the demands of entrance exams combined with middle class definition of success which is becoming a doctor or an engineer, has fueled development of entrance exam factories at Kota.

Kota, a name now synonymous with coaching institutes was once known for reasons not even minutely related to coaching. It has now risen to become coaching capital of India with more than 200,000 students residing in this small city. Undergoing emotional transitions of teenage life, these students work hard day and night to achieve a humble dream, a dream to enter into a prestigious engineering or medical institute, a dream to become a doctor or an engineer, a dream to leave behind financially constrained life, a dream which is the product of simple Indian mentality. Amidst such emotional and lifestyle challenges, a few of them succeed to get into the premiere institutes. In fact one fourth of people who make into IITs are a product of one or the other Kota coaching institutes. But this training to become the poster boy/girl does not completely shut their dreams. These dreams which may or may not be aligned with their duty to clear the entrance are expressed in the form of scribbles here and there.

Through this project, I aim to explore the life of students in Kota. I do not intend to show the “successful” or “unsuccessful” stories. I aspire to show the transformations a student undergoes while being factory trained to explore their dreams through the metaphor ‘The Last Page of Notebook’. I do not wish to take position of a judge and justify or criticize the coaching business. Rather I wish to create sensitivity towards theses emotional changes in an unbiased manner.

Case Study Download:
• Coaching Student Life at Kota......