Rajinder Nagar Tragedy is Symptomatic of a Drowning System

It is a terrible tale of a cursed (urban) hamlet. Old Rajinder Nagar, situated in the heart of New Delhi, witnessed a tragedy of epic proportions. Three students drowned to death in a basement whilst studying and preparing for their civil service examinations.

The whole thing sounds unbelievable in light of the location of the tragedy. Delhi is not a low-lying area that is afflicted with perennial torrential rains. And the area where the accident happened has all the necessary amenities that are supposed to make civic life possible.

I visited Old Rajinder Nagar for the first time in 2018. At that time, I saw swarms of sullen faces going and coming out of their classes. They did not talk to each other. Everyone seemed tired. The whole setting seemed to me like a shopping complex where education and dreams of a cushy life in the civil services were being sold to those who could afford it.

Since most of the rooms are shared and in bad shape, 90 percent of students opt for ‘libraries’ to study.

My second trip to the area, on July 30, 2024, was a completely different experience. This time protesting students had gathered to demand justice for their three friends.

Most of the students were between 21–28 years of age. Almost all came from a middle-class and lower-middle-class background. The game against the real Indian poor is already rigged because with average annual earnings of ₹17,500 and ₹60,000, the sons and daughters of rural agricultural wage labourers and urban non-agricultural wage labourers, respectively, could not even think of studying in coaching institutions of New Delhi.

The annual tuition fee of good and reputed coaching centres ranges between ₹1,50,000 to ₹2,50,000. Add to it the living expenses which range between ₹10,000–₹25,000 for a room. Food, travel, books and other miscellaneous expenses come to ₹7,000–8,000 per month. Since most of the rooms are shared and in bad shape, 90 percent of students opt for ‘libraries’ to study. One should not make the mistake of assuming these ‘libraries’ are real public libraries that house books and archives.

They are medium-sized halls or rooms with tables and chairs where students pay ₹2,000–₹3,000 each month just to sit and study. The local landlords’ hunger for profit is such that the day the tragedy happened and most of the ‘libraries’ on the ground floors were inundated, they overnight raised the rents of those located on the first and second floors to ₹5,000!

Almost a million students annually sit for the examination conducted by the Union Public Services Commission (UPSC). In partial fulfilment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s dream of ‘minimum government and maximum governance’, the number of vacancies has come down from 1,228 in 2013 to 749 in 2021.

The small increase in the number of seats 1,011 in 2022 and 1,022 in 2023 happened because of the merger of railway seats from the Indian Engineering Services to the UPSC examinations.

Overall, the size of the UPSC pie is shrinking. Another reason for the shrinkage is the government’s long-term plan to have more ‘specialists’ and ‘technocrats’ through lateral entry.

Despite the shrinkage, young Indians prefer to have government jobs. In a 2019 survey, more than 80 percent of Indians ranging between 23 and 38 years of age wanted the government to create more jobs in the public sector.

The sense of security that a government job provides is such that a 2017 survey revealed that 33 percent of young people accorded the greatest priority to having a permanent job in the public sector, even if it meant drawing a little less salary.

Overall, the size of the UPSC pie is shrinking. Another reason for the shrinkage is the government’s long-term plan to have more ‘specialists’ and ‘technocrats’ through lateral entry.

Given the embrace of neoliberalism by the government of India since the early 1990s, jobs in the public sector have been sharply decreasing. In 1992–93, there were 19.5 million jobs in the public sector whilst the population of India was 839 million.

Now, with a population of 1.4 billion, the average number of jobs has shrunk to 17.6 million. The future of India is dark. One should just look at those countries that first embraced neo-liberal policies in the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

Under the Prime Ministership of the ultra-conservative Margaret Thatcher, between 1979–83, Britain lost two million jobs in industry and 1.7 million jobs in manufacturing.

The rapid sale of public sector units in India (which used to be the biggest employers of the formal workforce) to the private sector is bound to hurt the job and job security prospects. Since there are no reservations in the private sector, the biggest sufferers will be those belonging to the reserved categories.

The current size of the coaching market is pegged at ₹58,000 crore. It is estimated that by 2028 it will reach a staggering value of approximately ₹1,34,000 crore.

The main reason for such a meteoric rise is the lack of public investment in the education sector. In 2013–14, the spending on education accounted for 0.63 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of India. In 2023–24, the already dismal figure dropped down to a measly 0.37 percent of the GDP.

Amongst the BRICS nations, India spends the lowest on education. In 2022, China spent 4.01 percent of its GDP on education. Astonishingly, the Indian higher education budget in 2024–25 declined by 17 percent. From ₹57,244 crore in 2023–24, it dipped to ₹47,619 crore in 2024–25.

Thanks to the miserly spending on education in India, an overwhelming majority of students fail to get quality education. The biggest beneficiaries of this governmental lapse are private coaching education centres. Just to (re)teach what a student is supposed to have learned at the school level, they charge hefty fees.

The coaching mafias wage a digital psychological warfare on students. Through clever use of social media clips and reels, they lure students into the civil services trap. Just like a casino, wherein the ‘someday I will win syndrome’ dominates, students are duly pumped to waste close to a decade of their most youthful years.

Bogus examples of Akbar, Birbal, Aurangzeb, Shivaji, Gandhi, Nehru, and Bose are marshalled from history as examples of great men, although none of them were civil servants!

Given the embrace of neoliberalism by the government of India since the early 1990s, jobs in the public sector have been sharply decreasing.

Another depressing fact about the coaching centres is their pedagogy, perfectly illustrated by a video of the famous ‘Avadh Ojha Sir’ wherein he is beseeching his students to be part of the ‘2 percent aristocratic elite’.

He was advising his students that “tum raja ho isiliye praja se zyada baat mat kiya karo, tumse baat karne ke liye log tarse … baat hi mat karo kisi se, tum (Indian Administrative Service) IAS ban jaoge” (you are a king, you should not speak to your subjects, they should long to talk to you …once you stop talking to commoners you will become an IAS officer. One wonders whether Ojha sir is grooming public servants of democracy or jagirdars and mansabdars of a Mughal court!

Most of the teachers at the coaching centres are or were aspirants who themselves could not manage to crack the civil service examination. They are not specialists by any stretch of the imagination with a solid record in academic journals and research magazines. They have no idea whatsoever of the latest cutting-edge research in the disciplines that they fervently teach.

Another set of influencers who are part of this criminal gamble are those who succeed in passing the civil service examinations. Post-success, they become the ‘hottest merchandise in the town’. They are called in by the coaching centres as motivational speakers and palliative icons for those going through the grind.

There are allegations and rumours of the exchange of hefty sums of money under the table between the coaching centres and the successful candidates for the latter to become their brand ambassadors.

The bigger coaching centres also poach successful candidates from other centres for their marketing. How enticing the coaching market is can be gauged from the fact that some civil servants resign from their jobs to start coaching centres. Some of them also become part of the spurious trade while they are under training.

The loot is duly facilitated by the government of Delhi, the municipal corporation, and the Delhi police which comes under the Union home ministry, Government of India.

Construction norms are flouted in broad daylight to accommodate students like cattle, illegally constructed houses, libraries and restaurants operate openly. A lack of scrutiny over two decades has finally resulted in this mess.

The protesting students are fighting against a hydra-headed monster. The students that I interacted with duly pinned the blame upon a profit-driven capitalist system wherein education is being sold like merchandise.

Thanks to the protests, the powers that be (government, police, landlords, brokers and owners of coaching institutions) have been caught with their pants down. The holy men and women, (glamorous and all-knowing) teachers have been humbled.

With a population of 1.4 billion, the average number of jobs has shrunk to 17.6 million. The future of India is dark.

The short-term solution to the problem lies in the capping of rent, demolition of all illegal structures, capping of tuition fees and the number of candidates enrolling in coaching centres and improvement in overall infrastructure.

The long-term solution lies in investing generously in the education sector by the government which will make private tutoring a thing of the past. This must be done by force if needed.

China too witnessed a massive mushrooming of private tutoring and coaching centres. In 2021, the Chinese government came down heavily on such parasitic centres. The coaching centres were labelled as a ‘stubborn malady’. All those centres that profited from teaching ‘core subjects’ (supposed to be taught at school) were banned.

The long-term solution lies in investing generously in the education sector by the government which will make private tutoring a thing of the past. This must be done by force if needed.

An alternative model could be for the government to establish coaching centres for no or nominal fees under the auspices of public universities. Such centres should have reservations as mandated by the Indian Constitution. Only then could the poorest of the Indian poor think of becoming civil servants.

Shubham Sharma is a research scholar at the Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, US.