Free coaching can widen the door. It won't redesign the exam

In many Indian homes, the question has quietly changed. It is no longer "Does my child need coaching?" It is "Which coaching, and how much can we afford?" That shift, more than any policy document, tells us where Indian education actually stands today.

This Independence Day, the Prime Minister named the pressure behind that shift with unusual candour. He said parents now feel that if they do not send a child to a coaching class, they are somehow not a "respectable family." He was announcing a national free online coaching network for competitive exams, built to save families the crores they currently spend on private preparation.

It deserves support, not scepticism. A government survey released last year found that 27 per cent of India's school students were taking private coaching, 30.7 per cent in cities and 25.5 per cent in villages. Coaching, in other words, is no longer a Kota phenomenon confined to NEET and JEE aspirants. It has quietly entered mainstream schooling itself. For families who cannot pay coaching fees that routinely run into lakhs, a genuine free alternative removes a barrier that has nothing to do with a child's ability and everything to do with a family's income.

But free coaching answers only one question. It does not answer the harder one: why has coaching become almost mandatory in the first place?

Government platforms are not new here. SATHEE, run by the education ministry with IIT Kanpur since 2023, already offers free video lectures, mentoring and mock tests for JEE, NEET and several other exams, taught by IIT and AIIMS faculty. What changes with this announcement is scale and intent, not the basic idea. And that is precisely why it is worth asking what SATHEE's three years have already shown us: giving every student the same free lecture is equality of access. It is not yet equality of outcome. A student with strong schooling and a quiet room to study extracts far more from that lecture than a first-generation learner still catching up on fundamentals.

The deeper reason coaching persists has less to do with price than with what our examinations reward. Roughly two million candidates compete each year for under 150,000 medical seats through NEET; JEE draws over a million aspirants for around 18,000 seats across the IITs. At that scale of scarcity, a syllabus stops testing learning and starts testing pattern recognition under time pressure — a specific, highly coachable skill. Coaching institutes do not win because they teach better. They win because they drill faster. Free coaching, if it only makes the same drill more widely available, will not shrink that economy. It will universalise it.

This is not an abstract worry. The government's own high-level committee, formed after repeated coaching-hub tragedies including in Kota, has spent the past year examining exactly this: whether NEET and JEE difficulty is out of step with the Class 12 syllabus, and how to make these exams less "coachable." Reports suggest the panel favours giving board exam performance up to 50 percent weightage in admissions, alongside regulating the coaching industry itself. That is the harder, more important reform, and it deserves at least as much attention as the free-coaching announcement.

The best examination is not one for which students cannot prepare. It is one for which the best preparation is simply a good education.

That brings the question home to schools. If classrooms taught for understanding the way coaching centres train for speed, coaching would become what it should always have been – a supplement for the ambitious, not a substitute for the school day. That is a harder job than building a portal. It asks school leaders to make core scholastic learning rigorous enough that a child does not need a second, costlier education running parallel to the first.

There is a quieter consequence worth naming too. Once quality content is free, private coaching cannot compete on content alone. What will separate institutes going forward is mentoring, diagnosis, personal attention – things a recorded lecture cannot offer. That may turn out to be the most useful long-term effect of this announcement, more than the subsidy itself.

Free coaching can make a genuinely unequal playing field a little more equal. But the success of this policy should eventually be measured by something other than how many students log into a free platform. It should be measured by how many of them no longer believe they cannot succeed without one.

The author is chairperson of the Association of International Schools of India (TAISI)