A survey conducted by Assocham Social Development Foundation has found that falling teaching standards and fear of poor performance in school and national level assessments drive urban Indian middle class parents to seek private tuitions for their school going children. The report states that “The origin of tuitions lies in bad classroom teaching… if a student feels the need for tuitions, it means the teacher has not been able to do justice in the class”. In another damning observation made by Mr. D.S. Rawat, Secretary General of Assocham, “Most schools conveniently pass the ball back to parents, telling them to engage private tutors. This is a serious failure in the education system”.
The survey highlights that parents spend as much as 1/3 of their monthly income on private tuitions and that an astonishing 97% of students in the surveyed cities were taking additional tuition classes in at least one subject (98% in Maths followed closely by Science subjects like Chemistry and Physics).
In urban India, the last few decades has witnessed a boom in private tuitions, group tuitions and tutorial classes which have now become one of the fastest-growing enterprises in India. The industry is estimated to be a multimillion rupee industry which has grown at 40%-45% in the last 5 years.
Assocham estimates that as many as 30 million students in major cities are attending tuition classes of one kind or the other with the demand for tuitions starting as early as primary school.
