Although it is politically correct to condemn it, there is a long tradition of private tutoring in India. Traditionally, poorly paid teachers would supplement their meager stipends by teaching a gathering of ten-15 students in a makeshift classroom after school hours. Essentially private tuition was given to weak students for remedial purposes.

However high stake entrance tests to reputed institutions such as the IIMs, IITs and a plethora of competitive exams for entry into government and public sector companies have changed this. Today full-fledged ‘coaching schools’ boasting prime commercial addresses with spacious classrooms capable of accommodating hundreds of students have mushroomed across the country. Their classrooms are air-conditioned and equipped with modern teaching aids and comfortable furniture. Customised education packages, glossy brochures and complete marketing strategies for promotion are de rigueur. Big coaching schools such as FIIT JEE, IMS, Career Launcher, and Career Point have become household names and run nationwide franchise operations with some of them even offering private tuitions over the internet to students overseas.

While many coaching centres are exploitative, charging heavy fees, and prey on the anxieties of parents, there are others that are well-organised, employ special-ised tutors, use self-learning instructional materials, and provide customised study programmes of high quality.

Little wonder that from being a somewhat guilty sub rosa activity centred around examinations, private tutoring is now a year-round phenomenon. A 1997 survey of 7,879 primary school children in Delhi revealed that 39.2 percent were receiving private tuition. At the secondary school level, private tuitions are more prevalent with the majority either attending organised coaching classes or being tutored privately. Although this is largely an urban phenomenon, private tuitions have made inroads in rural areas as well.

Private tutoring is now a significant part of household expenditure. The expenditure on organised coaching in India is estimated at Rs.7,000 crore per year — nearly half of what the government spends on higher education annually. Therefore the popular politically correct contention that private tutoring is anti-social, needs to be questioned and re-examined.

In a nationwide survey in 1999, two-thirds of respondents opined that coaching institutes flourish because of poor quality of education. Moreover nearly 90 percent said that the competition to enter top grade education institutions has become so severe, even the best students feel the need for supplementary tuition. More significantly 90 percent of urban middle class parents indicated that they were prepared to pay high private tuition fees as they believe it is an investment in their children’s future.

Of course there’s a downside to the growing private tuition phenomenon. It weakens students’ self-directed learning capabilities, encourages low student engagement in classroom teaching and imposes undue pressures, both financial and psychological, on parents as well as students. Private tuitions also accentuate inequalities in the race for admission into top level higher education institutions. Moreover the tuition culture is making education a uni-focal exam oriented activity. It force-feeds students with information to score high marks while neglecting the development of their questioning, reasoning and analytical abilities.

Yet despite the widely acknowledged downside of private tutoring, it is spreading globally. The effectiveness of Japan’s school system in teaching difficult subjects like maths and science is often attributed to the widespread after-school tutoring system known as juku and yobiko. Likewise high spending on private tuition (hakwon) in Korea is believed to have contributed significantly to facilitating the high academic achievements of Korean students, particularly their high science and maths scores.

Against this backdrop and global growth of the private tuition or supplementary education industry, it is difficult to condemn tutoring as anti-social. Private tuitions fill an education vacuum created by inadequate formal school systems. Although even with private tutoring only a few thousand students of hundreds of thousands of aspirants may get entry into the limited number of top rated institutions, the competition tends to push up the science and maths skills of a large section of the student population who write public entrance exams. It is arguable that the coaching class phenomenon provides a competitive edge to the workforce in India, especially in the IT and engineering industries.

In the short term growing dissatisfaction of parents with India’s crumbling and over-crowded formal school system is likely to stimulate — rather than abate — private tutoring. Private tuition costs will eat up a sizeable proportion of household budgets even as government efforts to curb and/ or monitor private tutoring are likely to meet with limited success. 

(Pawan Agarwal is visiting scholar at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), Delhi)