New Delhi: On 15 June, horrifying visuals emerged on social media, depicting hapless students rappeling and dangling from the windows of a three-storey building in North-West Delhi’s Mukherjee Nagar. Some even slipped and fell off the sides of the building, which erupted in flames after electric meters on the ground floor caught fire. The building housed private coaching centres, with around 250 students present at the time of the incident. Of these, 61 were injured in the pandemonium that ensued.
This episode is proof of the deplorable conditions that many students — who come to these coaching centres to prepare for UPSC, NEET, and other competitive exams— are compelled to endure. According to a Delhi Fire Services (DFS) audit of 500 coaching centres in the city, conducted after the Delhi High Court took suo moto cognisance of the incident on 16 June, only a handful had basic firefighting equipment.
According to a senior DFS officer who spoke to this author on condition of anonymity, the issue stems from “not having an idea about fire safety precautions in Delhi, since they have never been regulated or checked”. Hefurther pointed out that since coaching centres don’t need to be registered or regulated as educational institutions, there is no reliable data on the exact amount of coaching centres in the city.
“If there was a fire safety check on most of the audited coaching institutions right now, it is true that a lot of them would fail, but that is also because they were not told or given any guidance about the required fire safety [equipment/norms] for their classrooms or buildings,” he says, adding that some reports, particularly in the Hindi news media, are “condemnable” for calling all coaching institutes and their students unsafe. “There are a variety of stakeholders, like the DFS, Delhi Police, Municipal Corporation of Delhi, and others. With the [Delhi] High Court taking up the issue, we are on our way to a solution,” he adds.
However, for the scores of students who left their homes and travelled to Delhi to prepare for competitive exams, fire safety is just the tip of the iceberg — they get no support or guidance either despite paying a high fee to these institutes and braving unhospitable conditions in a city foreign to them.
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Struggles of migrant students
Pradeep, 26, hails from Bihar’s Gopalganj, where his father is a farmer. He has been attending Mukherjee Nagar’s Sanskriti IAS for the last three years – one of the three coaching centres with a classroom in the building that caught fire. “All my juniors were trapped in the classroom when the fire broke out. And I couldn’t help because I wasn’t there.”
Coaching at Sanskriti IAS costs Pradeep about Rs 1.5 lakh a year, but there is no support or guidance to match that exorbitant fee. “We get study materials and teachers, and the institute is done. They don’t care about how you live, whether you live under the sun or the rain or have a roof over your head. They don’t care if we come to class or not; they don’t care if we live or die, koi farknahi padhta,” he says. This particular coaching centre even charges Rs 3.2 lakhfor a course.
“After they get the money, they just care about completing the course,” Pradeep adds. Furthermore, he says there is no handholding for those unable to clear their exams or interviews. They are not given any counselling on the alternatives available to them, while the few that get through are plastered on the institutions’ promotional billboards and pamphlets.
Pradeep has attempted the UPSC exam thrice. After his second try, he went to speak to a director, who did not listen to him for more than five minutes. “They are taking so much money from us, and they won’t even talk to us. Is it easy for anyone’s parents to earn and spend Rs 1.5 lakh a year?”
About fire safety conditions, Pradeep says, “There hasn’t been a single mock drill or anything of the sort in the three years I have been here. The classroom I sat in had hundreds of students in one class; it was sometimes very suffocating. The room felt like it was on fire even when it wasn’t.”
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No support, no guidance
Most large coaching centres in the city, even the well-established, higher-end ones, do not offer any support to students who fail to clear their papers. Anushka, 22, came to Delhi in 2019 to take NEET coaching from a well-reputed institute in South Delhi. But she could not clear the exam and was left to scramble for alternatives alone. “Overall, in terms of hygiene and safety conditions, my coaching centre was very good. However, there is no support for students who cannot pass their papers, and that is true of nearly all coaching centres in the city. After the course, if you do not pass, it is not their responsibility,” she says, adding that “there is no point” asking for guidance from institutes solely focused on zipping through course materials and flaunting toppers.
A 23-year-old student from Jharkhand, who does not wish to be named, has come to study at the Mukherjee Nagar centre of a reputed IAS prep institute. He says that classes were arbitrarily delayed after students had already arrived in the city, causing a lot of “frustration” at the “negligence” in relaying information.
“We come here from our villages, and only we know how we push ourselves daily in the cramped conditions we stay in while also being pressured to study 10+ hours a day,” says the distressed student. “There is no one to help us; we have to fend for ourselves at coaching, too, [and] fight even to get concepts clarified if we have not understood them. On top of that, there is always the pressure of doing right by our family. Even getting through a day feels like a battle.”
Prabhanu Kumar Das is a student of Convergent Journalism at AJK MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia and a graduate in political science. He has also written for FiftyTwo.in, Himal, and Newsclick and was a part-time editor with Youth Ki Awaaz.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)