Fourteen Days of Silence

A 19-year-old NEET aspirant in Sikar, Rajasthan, did not attend his coaching classes for fourteen consecutive days. The institute's automated SMS alert system — which existed specifically to notify parents of absences — sent nothing. His family found out he was gone when the police called.

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His parents were farmers in rural Rajasthan. To fund his second attempt at NEET-UG — the fees at Gurukripa Career Institute in Sikar, plus accommodation on Piprali Road — they had taken out agricultural loans totalling approximately ₹2.2 lakh.

He was 19. He had attempted NEET once before and was trying again. Sikar — which had grown rapidly over the preceding decade into Rajasthan's second coaching megahub, with over one lakh students enrolled across fifty institutes — was where his family believed his chances were best.

On 4 March 2024, he was found dead in his paying guest room on Piprali Road.

The police informed his family. That was the first they had heard from anyone that something was wrong.

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The Fourteen Days

He had stopped attending classes two weeks before his death.

Gurukripa Career Institute, like most coaching centres of its scale, maintained a biometric attendance system. It also operated an automated SMS alert service — a system that was supposed to send parents a message whenever their child missed a class. This infrastructure existed precisely because most coaching students live far from home and their families have no other way of knowing whether they are attending.

For fourteen consecutive days of missed classes, the system sent nothing.

The family's first contact from anyone associated with the institute came after the police call. The institute subsequently told reporters that they maintained biometric records and had attempted to contact the student's local guardian. They did not specify when that attempt was made, or what the response had been.

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Sikar: The City Kota Made

Sikar's emergence as a coaching hub is a direct consequence of Kota's reputation problem.

Following years of suicide coverage, some families began looking for alternatives — smaller cities, newer institutes, lower costs, and the same outcome. Sikar offered that: coaching at roughly half the Kota price, growing infrastructure, and proximity to Jaipur. The enrolment grew accordingly.

What transferred, along with the students, was the same underlying structure: intensive preparation schedules, competitive batch sorting, high family financial stakes, and young people living alone in an unfamiliar city, far from home, under pressure they often could not articulate to the people who had sacrificed to send them there.

Sikar had no equivalent of Kota's district-level safety infrastructure — no trained warden network, no spring-loaded fan mandates, no "Dinner with Collector" sessions. The regulatory frameworks that Kota had developed after years of tragedy had not yet been replicated in the satellite city.

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What Changed After

The Sikar District Administration formed a regulatory inspection committee to audit all Piprali Road hostels and coaching PGs. It issued mandatory guidelines requiring daily parental SMS notification for absent students — not weekly, not after a threshold, but daily.

The Rajasthan State Human Rights Commission issued a notice to the Sikar District Collector seeking a compliance report on coaching safety measures.

A dedicated monitoring cell was established for coaching hostels in the district.

These were the right responses. They came one death too late for this particular family, who had borrowed money from their farmland to send their son to a city whose alert system went quiet for two weeks while he needed someone to notice.

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Timeline: INC-2024-RJ-SIKAR-0012

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Sources & Further Reading

1. "NEET aspirant dies by suicide in Sikar PG; family alleges absence of coaching attendance alert" — Times of India, 5 March 2024. timesofindia.indiatimes.com
2. "High Pressure, Routine Tests, Shame Batches: Inside Kota's Dark Coaching Engine" — The Indian Express, 4 September 2023. indianexpress.com
3. iCall: 9152987821 | Vandrevala Foundation: 1860-2662-345 (24-hour helpline)