KOTA SUICIDES : ANY SOLUTIONS ? For the past many years, JEE coaching hubs especially Kota & Hyderabad have recorded student suicides every year of which many were unreported besides thousands of (unreported) cases of mental depression, hyper-anxiety and mental trauma every year. In 2023 alone so far, there have been 26 reported suicides of students in Kota which has gained national media attention and has prompted the Rajasthan Govt to ban all internal exams of coaching institutes for 2 months. There may be multiple reasons (illness, break-ups, academic failure, pressure from parents, unpaid loans etc) for this phenomenon (accurate info on causes of suicide is difficult to find) and this article attempts to identify the non-behavioural external probable causes behind these suicides and suggests measures from all stake-holders (Govt, coaching classes, schools, parents, students, society and media too!) to significantly resolve this burning issue. Let us first accept one bas...
The pandemic triggered a shift from offline in-person education to online education across the world since March 2020. Now that, almost 20 months have transpired, it is worth analysing the impact of online education on the students community. After collating data from various stakeholders like teachers, students, parents, academic staff etc working across the cross-sections of the education industry, the following key observations have been crystallised : There is near unanimity on the view that Teaching is more effective in offline mode as compared to online mode. Though live interactive online lectures plus recordings offsets to a large extent the relative advantage of offline lectures over online lectures, the online teaching has proved quite ineffective for students who lack sincerity. The eye-to-eye interaction between the teacher and student in offline in-person mode ensures that all students (sincere and insincere) are in the loop which often does not happen in online mode where...