Great coaching scam & abomination

How broken our governance and how incredible our hypocrisy must be that we cannot make profits from educating young Indians, but can earn thousands of crores by giving them tuitions?

- SHEKHAR GUPTA

Everybody who matters anywhere in our "system" is now trying to do something about the death by drowning of three young people in the basement library of Rau's IAS Study Circle in Old Rajinder Nagar, west Delhi's UPSC coaching hub.

The Delhi High Court has handed over the investigation to the CBI, while the Delhi government has sealed a whole bunch of such basements at multiple other coaching centres and announced that it will pass a law regulating such businesses. Some owners and senior management members have been arrested.

And to cap the absurdity, the Delhi Police has made world headlines by arresting the owner and driver of an SUV that merely happened to drive across the flooded street, apparently, pushing the water into the basement and causing the flood.

Some of the owners of these coaching centres and superstar "teachers" are appearing on selected media platforms, particularly those with which they have had mutually beneficial commercial relationships, to express fake sympathy with the victims but mostly for self-exculpation.

Nobody is particularly focused on the key question: If this is how much you charge, or you earn this much fame on Instagram from the reels you make, how come you're still running "classes" in these unsafe, unhygienic, slum-like conditions?

Or how is it that while they charge their students top dollar on the promise that they can game a system with a failure rate of about 99.8 per cent, they do not spend on providing at least some basic facilities and safety?

This, in our ridiculous system where it isn't legal to make profits from education. You run universities, colleges, schools but pretend you make no profits.