Loading The NEET Files...
NEET has grown to 24 lakh applicants. Government medical seats have not kept pace. The gap between these two lines is where the coaching industry lives.
In 2018, researchers from TISS surveyed 1,051 students in Kota coaching hostels. Nearly half showed symptoms of anxiety. Nearly a third showed symptoms of depression.
Kota Police have maintained a record of student suicides in the city since 2015. The data runs to 2024. This is what the official numbers show — and what they cannot tell us.
Government surveys reveal that Indian households spend nearly 12% of their total education budget on private coaching alone. In hubs like Kota, that expenditure triples into a ₹58,000-crore parallel economy.
In 2022, a peer-reviewed clinical investigation administered the PHQ-9, GAD-7, and PSS-10 to 250 coaching students in Kota. One in three met the diagnostic criteria for clinical depression.
In the summer of 2024, NEET-UG was roiled by 67 perfect scores, burnt question booklets in Patna, and an unprecedented Supreme Court hearing. This is what forensic and judicial evidence proved.
In late 2023, social scientists from Lokniti-CSDS surveyed over 1,000 students across Kota’s coaching hubs. Quantitative data on 14–16 hour study regimens, internal batch reshuffling, and the 3% counseling barrier.
In September 2021, the Justice A.K. Rajan Committee published a census of over 30,000 medical admissions in Tamil Nadu across a decade. In the year before NEET, government school students secured 14.4% of seats. Four years later, that figure collapsed to 0.13%.
Every year, the same ten national toppers appear on the front-page ads of four competing institutes. In 2024, the Central Consumer Protection Authority initiated a legal crackdown, penalizing institutes for deceptive rank claims. This is how the "topper factory" is manufactured.
In January 2024, the Ministry of Education issued nationwide guidelines barring coaching centers from enrolling students under age 16, mandating pro-rata fee refunds, and capping study hours. Two years later, the guidelines face legal deadlocks, concurrent list friction, and municipal inertia.
Bodhi Tree, BYJU'S & Physics Wallah Regulatory Filings
UNESCO-IIEP Comparative Monograph (Mark Bray)
Each article in this archive is built around a specific research study, dataset, legal document, or body of evidence. The goal is to make research legible — not to summarise it, but to explain it: what was studied, who was studied, how it was studied, what was found, and crucially, what the evidence does not prove.
Sources are cited specifically. Claim statuses are assessed. Limitations are stated. Where evidence is contested or incomplete, that is noted explicitly. This is journalism built around research — not research converted into journalism.