Shut the coaching factories down

The ink was barely dry on the NEET-UG answer sheets when the first whispers began. Then came the screenshots, the WhatsApp forwards, the outraged parents, and finally, the staggering admission: the paper had leaked. Millions of students who had spent years — and their families, lakhs of rupees — preparing for a single exam were told, in effect, that the game had been rigged before it began. The government responded swiftly — ordering a CBI investigation, announcing a re-examination, and fast-tracking systemic reforms. But even as accountability was being demanded in the right places, one culpable party continued to escape scrutiny: the vast, lucrative coaching industry that had built an entire economy around gaming the very exam that had just been gamed.

That is the scandal within the scandal. We are debating the leak. We should be debating the ecosystem that made it not just possible, but inevitable.

The coaching industrial complex

India’s private coaching industry is worth an estimated Rs 58,000 crore and growing. It employs hundreds of thousands of teachers, counsellors, and administrators. It has built entire cities — Kota and Sikar being the few of the most visible — around the singular, grim enterprise of drilling teenagers into rank-producing machines. It promises parents a ladder out of mediocrity and charges them ferociously for the privilege of climbing it. But what it actually sells is access.

Not knowledge. Not skill. Not curiosity or critical thinking. Access — to question banks, to leaked patterns, to insider intelligence about what an exam is likely to test. In a system where a single national test determines the fate of a doctor’s career, that access is everything. And it is available, exclusively, to those who can pay for it.

A student from a government school in rural Bihar, however brilliant, is not competing on the same field as a student who has spent two years in a Sikar hostel, taking mock tests every Sunday and being coached by faculty who sometimes have suspiciously accurate foreknowledge of exam trends. This is not a level playing field. It is a field that has been carefully tilted, and then sold back to us as meritocracy.

The paper leak is a symptom

When we trace the NEET paper leak, we follow a trail that almost always winds through the coaching ecosystem - through centers that trade in “sure shot” questions, through networks of middlemen who monetize desperation, through a culture that has normalised, even celebrated, the idea that you don’t beat the exam, you game it. The leak did not happen despite the coaching industry. It happened because of the culture the coaching industry has normalised: that an exam is a commodity, that a rank can be manufactured, that everything has a price.

There will be those who argue that coaching centers merely respond to demand — that if competitive exams are brutal, someone must prepare students for them. This is the logic of the arms dealer who blames the war. The coaching industry has lobbied, quietly and effectively, against exam reforms that would reduce its relevance. It profits from the very anxiety it stokes. It is not a solution to an unfair system; it is a co-architect of one.

The Government acts: It and must go further

To its credit, the government has moved. The decision to re-conduct the tainted NEET examination is the right call — a necessary act of faith towards the lakhs of honest students who deserved an untainted shot. More significantly, the announcement that the exam will shift to an online, computer-based format from next year is a genuine structural reform. Digital delivery, with randomized question sets, timed server-side encryption, and decentralised testing centers, makes the kind of wholesale physical paper leak we witnessed dramatically harder to execute. This is a good step. It deserves acknowledgment.

But it also raises an uncomfortable question: if we are redesigning the exam to defeat the coaching-center cheat network, why are we leaving the coaching centers themselves standing? The online shift will force them to adapt - and adapt they will, pivoting to “digital mock test” packages and AI-assisted rote drilling, charging even more for the upgrade. The problem is not merely the medium of the paper. The problem is the entire philosophy of preparation that the coaching industry represents. And that philosophy - memorize, repeat, regurgitate, rank - is not just unfair. In the world that these students are about to enter, it is catastrophically useless.

Rote Factories in the Age of AI

Let us be honest about what coaching centers actually teach. They teach pattern recognition of a very specific, very narrow kind. They teach students to identify which formula to apply to which template problem in the least possible time. They reward memory over understanding, speed over reflection, and imitation over inquiry.

In two years of intensive coaching, a student learns to think less, not more - to suppress the inconvenient question, ignore the interesting tangent, and stay ruthlessly on syllabus.

This was always educationally bankrupt. It is now also economically catastrophic.

We are entering an age where artificial intelligence can outperform any coaching-center graduate at the one skill they have spent years perfecting: rote recall and pattern-matched problem solving. An AI can memorize every past NEET paper, identify every recurring question type, and generate ten thousand practice problems before breakfast. If that is all our doctors, engineers, and scientists know how to do, they will be redundant within a decade - not because they failed, but because the system trained them to be replaceable.

Ben Sasse, the American academic and former senator, put it well in a recent essay: the future will be awe-inspiring for those who master the tools of technology, and deeply miserable for those who outsource their thinking and habits to algorithms. The goal, he argues, is to help young people make the most of technology - rather than become a slave to it. Our coaching centers are producing exactly the wrong kind of graduate for this future: young people trained to think like pre-AI computers, drilled in retrieval and imitation, not reasoning and creation. We are, in effect, spending lakhs of rupees to produce minds that a few Rupees worth AI subscription can already outperform.

There is another casualty that rarely gets counted: reading. Coaching centers are notorious for gutting the reading habit. There is no time for books, for wandering curiosity, for the kind of long-form thinking that builds genuine intellect. Yet it is precisely this habit - of deep reading, sustained attention, and intellectual range - that separates a mind capable of navigating the AI age from one that will be consumed by it. A generation that does not read will not lead. It will follow - and eventually, be replaced.

What the AI economy demands - urgently, structurally - is precisely what coaching centers destroy. Creativity. Lateral thinking. Emotional intelligence. The ability to synthesize across disciplines, ask questions that have no textbook answer, and sit comfortably with ambiguity. A doctor who can reason, adapt, and empathize will always be irreplaceable. A doctor optimized purely for MCQ performance is already being disrupted.

The NEET leak and the online reform together give us a hinge moment. We can tweak the exam and call it a day. Or we can ask what kind of minds we are trying to build - and construct a system worthy of that ambition.

A Workable Alternative

Every school and college in India already has teachers, classrooms, and infrastructure that sits largely unused after 2 PM. State governments must mandate - and fund - structured remedial and advanced augmenting programs within school premises, free of cost, for students preparing for competitive examinations. These programs, staffed by trained teachers with standardized curricula set by academic bodies, would bring preparation back into the public system - accountable, auditable, and equally accessible.

This is not utopian. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Kerala have all run successful in-school models that sent thousands of students to IITs and medical colleges without a rupee going to a private coaching baron. The template exists. What is missing is the will to scale it - and the courage to confront a Rs 58,000-crore industry that would rather we didn’t.

What Meritocracy Actually Requires

A meritocracy is only legitimate if the race begins from the same starting line. Right now, it does not. A child whose parents can afford years of Kota coaching starts ten metres ahead. That is not merit. That is inheritance wearing merit’s clothing.

The NEET leak, the re-examination, the online pivot - all of it has given us a rare window of national attention. Do not waste it on half-measures. Shut the coaching centers. Open the classrooms. Teach children to think, not just to score. The exam of the future will test minds that machines cannot replicate.

Let us build those minds.

Rohit Kumar Singh, Former Secretary, Govt of India; Views presented are personal.