How one man’s classroom turned Kota into India’s coaching capital

Kota, once a quiet town in Rajasthan, has transformed into India’s coaching capital. In the JEE Advanced 2025 results, four of the top 10 ranks — including AIR 1, Rajit Gupta — were secured by students from Kota. This has reinforced the city’s academic dominance. From a small town to a billion-rupee coaching hub, Kota is now synonymous with IIT-JEE success.

It started with one teacher — Vinod Kumar Bansal

According to India Today, Kota’s rise can be traced back to 1980s, when Vinod Kumar Bansal — an engineer diagnosed with muscular dystrophy — began tutoring students from his home. His health condition forced him to leave his job at JK Synthetics. But instead of giving up, he founded Bansal Classes. Soon his students cracked the IIT-JEE exam — and a legend was born.

The Bansal ripple effect

The success of Bansal Classes inspired many of Bansal’s former students and teachers to branch out and launch their own institutes — including Resonance, Motion, Career Point, Rao Academy, and Allen. Over the next two decades, Kota evolved from a struggling town to India’s largest coaching hub.

What makes Kota’s model so successful?

Reports highlight Kota’s unique advantage: a highly structured and disciplined coaching ecosystem: Rigorous timetables, weekly performance tracking, carefully designed test series, highly experienced faculty (often IIT graduates themselves), hostel-cum-coaching environments designed solely for productivity.

This intense system consistently delivers results — as seen in 2025, when Allen Institute alone mentored four of the Top 10 AIRs in JEE Advanced.

An entire city built around exams

From housing to transport, food delivery to stationery shops — Kota is now “an education-powered economy.” Each year, nearly 1.5–2 lakh students migrate to the city in pursuit of IIT and NEET dreams. Entire micro-industries thrive around this seasonal influx.

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But success comes at a cost

So far in 2025, The Guardian reported, 14 students in Kota died by suicide — despite efforts including counselling centres, “happiness hostels,” and mental health helplines.

Career counsellor Prateek Bhargava told India Today that the city still suffers from “fear marketing” — the notion that if you don’t study in Kota, you might fall behind in life.