The Regulation Dilemma
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. This is why shadow education resists the state.
On January 16, 2024, the Union Ministry of Education did something unprecedented in Indian administrative history: it formally acknowledged that private coaching centers are no longer supplementary tutoring classes, but a pervasive shadow schooling system requiring direct state control.
The ministry’s *Guidelines for Regulation of Coaching Center* were radical in their scope.
They prohibited coaching centers from enrolling any child under the age of 16. They banned classes during formal school hours. They mandated that if a student leaves a course midway, all remaining tuition and hostel fees must be refunded within ten days. They capped daily classroom teaching at 5.5 hours, required mandatory counseling staff, and prohibited misleading rank claims.
On paper, the guidelines promised to dismantle the industrial machinery of competitive test prep.
In the coaching enclaves of Kota, Sikar, and Hyderabad, however, the response was business as usual. Foundation batches for middle-school children continued under rebranding; dummy school tie-ups adapted; and parents continued to sign non-refundable fee indemnities.
This article examines what the Ministry of Education attempted to regulate, why the constitutional division of powers creates an enforcement void, and what international comparisons from South Korea and China teach us about why private coaching routinely defeats government attempts to regulate it.
MoE Coaching Guidelines (2024): Policy Mandates vs. Enforcement Status
Current ground implementation status across major coaching hubs (2024–2026)
Consumer courts actively enforce; institutes resist voluntary payout
Weakly enforced; foundation courses rebranded under hybrid labels
Routinely bypassed; evening shifts extend into late night
Cosmetic compliance; counselor utilization remains at 3.2%
Substantially enforced following Delhi basement flooding scrutiny
Evaluated from State Education Department notifications, legal challenges, and field reporting in Kota, Sikar, and Delhi.
The core mandates: What the 2024 guidelines required
The January 2024 guidelines addressed the primary systemic abuses documented by research commissions, consumer courts, and judicial inquiries:
1. The Under-16 Ban (Ending Early Foundation Enclaves): The guidelines expressly prohibited coaching institutes from enrolling students below the age of 16 years or before the completion of secondary school (Class 10). This provision targeted the coaching industry's fastest-growing segment: "Pre-Foundation" and "Olympiad" courses enrolling children in Classes 6, 7, and 8 (ages 11–13). Developmental psychologists and the TISS 2018 report had warned that subjecting pre-pubescent children to timed multiple-choice testing damages cognitive development, play socialization, and emotional maturation.
2. Mandatory Pro-Rata Refunds: Historically, coaching contracts featured rigid, non-negotiable clauses stating that fees paid were "strictly non-refundable under any circumstances." When students experienced acute burnout, severe depression, or medical emergencies within months of arriving in Kota, families forfeited their entire ₹1.5 lakh to ₹3 lakh tuition payment. The 2024 guidelines mandated that if a student withdraws for any reason, the remaining course fees and hostel charges must be refunded on a pro-rata basis within 10 days.
3. Temporal Caps and School Protection: To combat the phenomenon of dummy schools, the guidelines prohibited coaching institutes from holding classes during regular school hours (typically 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM). Furthermore, daily coaching instructional time was capped at a strict maximum of 5.5 hours per day, and institutes were barred from conducting classes or tests on designated weekly off days.
4. Mandatory Mental Health Safeguards: Institutes were mandated to establish on-site counseling cells staffed by licensed clinical psychologists, conduct regular mental health first-aid training for faculty, and institute transparent, anonymous grievance redressal portals.
The constitutional deadlock: The Concurrent List friction
Despite the clarity of the guidelines, their legal enforceability encountered an immediate constitutional obstacle: the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution of India.
Under the Seventh Schedule, "Education" is placed on Entry 25 of the Concurrent List, meaning both the Union Parliament and State Legislative Assemblies possess the power to legislate on educational matters.
However, the Ministry of Education’s January 2024 document was not a parliamentary statute (an Act passed by both houses of Parliament). It was issued as an advisory model framework circulated to state governments with the directive: *"States and UTs are advised to consider implementing these guidelines through appropriate legal framework or statutory rules."*
Because the guidelines are advisory model rules rather than a binding central statute: - Unless an individual state legislature passes a state-specific Coaching Regulation Act or formally adopts the guidelines into existing state laws, district collectors have no statutory power to seal non-compliant institutes, revoke municipal licenses, or enforce refund orders. - Major coaching hub states — particularly Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana — have hesitated to enact strict statutory enforcement. In these states, local municipal economies, hostel associations, real estate developers, and commercial chambers exert powerful political pressure against measures that would restrict student footfall or mandate pro-rata fee refunds.
The dummy school bypass: Institutional evasion
The guideline prohibiting coaching during regular school hours directly attacked the "dummy school" phenomenon — but the market adapted within months.
A "dummy school" (or non-attending school) is a private institution affiliated with CBSE, CISCE, or a state board that formally enrolls a coaching student, marks their daily attendance as 100% present in official school registers, conducts dummy internal laboratory assessments, and enters them for board exams, while the student never sets foot on the school campus.
Coaching institutes bypassed the 2024 guidelines through two primary mechanisms: 1. Re-titling Morning Batches: Morning classes were reclassified on paper as "Integrated Academic Synchronized Programs" or "School-Level Remedial Support," creating legal ambiguity over whether the instruction constituted coaching or supplementary schooling. 2. Evening & Shift Clustering: Institutes pushed formal coaching lectures to start at 2:15 PM and run until 8:00 PM, technically complying with the school-hour restriction while cramming the same 6-hour lecture burden into late afternoons, followed by mandatory night study sessions that exacerbated student sleep deprivation.
While the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) conducted surprise inspections in 2024, disaffiliating over 20 dummy schools in Delhi and Rajasthan, the number of dummy affiliations nationwide is estimated in the thousands, rendering sporadic audits largely ineffective.
Global lessons: Why bans and curfews fail (South Korea & China)
India is not the first country to attempt state regulation of hyper-competitive shadow education. The regulatory trajectories of South Korea and China provide instructive warnings:
The South Korean Hagwon Struggle: South Korea has attempted to regulate its private tutoring academies (*hagwons*) for over four decades: - In 1980, the military government banned all private tutoring outright. The policy failed completely: tutoring went underground, fees skyrocketed on black markets, and enforcement became impossible. The constitutional court invalidated the ban in 2000. - Subsequent governments introduced a 10:00 PM hagwon curfew, deploying special night-patrol inspectors ("hagwon busters") to raid illegal late-night cram sessions. Despite decades of curfews and digital monitoring, household spending on hagwons continues to exceed 2.5% of South Korean GDP.
China’s Double Reduction Policy (2021): In July 2021, the Chinese government enacted the world’s most aggressive state intervention: the "Double Reduction" policy, which completely outlawed for-profit commercial tutoring in core school subjects and prohibited venture capital investment in test-prep EdTech. - While marquee corporate giants (such as New Oriental and TAL Education) were dismantled, tutoring rapidly decentralized into underground one-on-one tutoring, luxury study retreats, and black-market digital coaching groups accessible only to the ultra-wealthy.
The international sociological consensus, summarized by educational researcher Mark Bray (UNESCO-IIEP), is clear: Shadow education cannot be regulated out of existence as long as the gatekeeper examination at the top remains an extreme, high-stakes elimination contest.
When 24 lakh candidates compete for 56,000 subsidized government medical seats, parental demand for competitive advantage is virtually price-inelastic. Suppressing formal institutes simply drives the demand into unregulated informal channels.
What this means: Treating the symptom, ignoring the cause
The Ministry of Education’s 2024 guidelines are well-intentioned. Mandating fire safety, fair refunds, counselor staffing, and an age floor of 16 are necessary consumer protection baselines that protect children from physical and commercial exploitation.
However, the regulatory debate suffers from a fundamental diagnosis error: it treats the coaching industry as the disease, rather than as a symptom.
The coaching industry did not create structural scarcity; public under-investment in higher education created structural scarcity. The coaching industry did not create the pressure on adolescents; an examination system that uses a single 3-hour multiple-choice test to decide a young person’s entire lifetime social mobility created the pressure.
Until India expands high-quality, state-funded higher education capacity, modernizes mainstream high school teaching to match entrance test standards, and creates viable, high-prestige alternative career pathways outside of engineering and medicine, administrative guidelines will remain paper promises easily circumvented by a relentless market.
What this doesn't prove
That regulations have accomplished nothing. In several cities, the 2024 guidelines and CCPA enforcement have empowered informed parents to demand fee refunds and challenge illegal forfeiture clauses in local consumer courts with unprecedented legal backing.
That all coaching centers openly flout every rule. Several reputable institutes have discontinued Classes 6–8 pre-foundation enrollments, hired qualified clinical counseling staff, and installed mandatory safety infrastructure in compliance with district directives.
That total deregulation is preferable. Complete absence of regulation historically allowed institutes to operate in fire-trap basements, conceal suicide occurrences, and lock families into multi-lakh debt traps. Regulatory baselines — even when weakly enforced — establish necessary legal boundaries of accountability.
Guidelines for Regulation of Coaching Center
- · Mandatory age floor of 16 years
- · 10-day pro-rata fee refund clause
- · 5.5-hour classroom instruction cap
- · Prohibition on school-hour coaching
Confronting the Shadow Education System: What Government Policies for What Private Tutoring?
- · Analysis of South Korean hagwon bans and 10 PM curfews
- · International evidence on the price-inelasticity of shadow education demand
- · Failure modes of administrative tutoring caps without structural entrance reform