ROOM 247. TALWANDI. KOTA. SOMEONE LIVED HERE.
Every year, India sends its children to a city in Rajasthan to become engineers and doctors. Every year, some of them do not come back the way they were sent. Some do not come back at all.
You already know what Kota is. You have seen the Netflix show. You have read the news articles that appear in July, in August, in September — because that is when the results come out, and that is when the ones who did not make it start doing the math.
But knowing what Kota is and understanding what Kota does are two entirely different things.
This is not an article with solutions. This is not a piece about what parents should do differently or what coaching institutes should change. This is about what actually happens inside a seventeen-year-old when a system designed for excellence turns into a machine that consumes the people it was built for.
01 — The Economy of Hope
Kota is not a city. Kota is a transaction.
A family in a small town in Bihar or UP or Madhya Pradesh looks at their child — fifteen, sixteen years old, decent grades, obedient — and decides that this child is the way out. Out of the village. Out of the debt. Out of the cycle that has held this family in place for two or three generations.
They borrow money. They sell land in some cases. They pay ₹1.5 lakh to ₹3 lakh per year just for coaching fees. Add rent, food, study material — a Kota education costs a family anywhere from ₹2 lakh to ₹5 lakh per year. For a family earning ₹20,000 a month, this is not an investment. This is everything.
The child understands this before they board the train. Nobody has to tell them. The weight of it is already there — in the way the father does not sleep well, in the way the mother packs the bag twice to make sure nothing is missing, in the relatives who come to see them off as if they are leaving for a war.
They are.
THESE ARE THE ONES WE COUNTED. THE REST WERE CALLED ACCIDENTS.
02 — What the Schedule Does to a Brain
A standard Kota student day looks like this: wake at six, coaching by eight, back by two, self-study until dinner, study again until midnight, sleep for five hours, repeat.
This is not a description of discipline. This is a description of sleep deprivation, social isolation, and chronic stress — three conditions that, when maintained for months, produce measurable changes in the prefrontal cortex. The part of the brain responsible for decision-making. For impulse control. For the ability to imagine the future differently from the present.
A student who has lived this schedule for eight months cannot think the way they thought before they came to Kota. Their brain has been physically altered by the experience. When the crisis comes — and in Kota, the crisis always comes, in the form of a failed test, a bad rank, a phone call home that goes wrong — they are not responding to it with the brain that left home. They are responding with a brain that has been stripped down to its most reactive, most exhausted state.
And in that state, a temporary problem starts to feel like a permanent condition.
“He used to call every Sunday. Then every two weeks. Then I stopped expecting the call. I thought he was studying. He was — until he wasn’t.”
— FATHER OF A KOTA STUDENT, 2022. NAME WITHHELD.
03 — The Architecture of Pressure
EVERY NODE PULLS. NONE OF THEM SUPPORT.
Look at what surrounds a Kota student.
Parents who have spent everything they have and are waiting. A village or a neighbourhood that has declared this child their representative. A coaching institute that ranks students publicly and drops those who fall below a threshold. Peers who are competitors first and human beings second — because that is what the environment makes them. A rank list on the wall of the room that tells them, every morning, exactly how far behind they are.
And nowhere in this architecture is there a single node that says: you are allowed to not be okay.
The coaching institutes installed fans with speed limiters and added grills to windows after the suicides became impossible to ignore. They called this intervention. They called this care.
They did not change the schedule. They did not change the ranking system. They did not remove the rank lists from the walls. They made it harder to die, which is not the same thing as making it easier to live.
04 — The Silence That Kills
The student who is breaking down in Kota does not tell anyone.
Not the parents — because the parents have sacrificed too much. To call home and say I am not okay is to say your sacrifice was a mistake, and that is a sentence most seventeen-year-olds cannot bring themselves to say to the people they love.
Not the friends — because in Kota, every friend is also a competitor, and vulnerability is information that can be used against you in a system that ranks everything.
Not the coaching institute — because the institute’s interest is in producing rankers, not in managing the psychological health of students who are slowing down.
So the student sits in the room. The room with the rank list on the wall. The room with the textbooks that stopped making sense three weeks ago. The room where the phone shows a father’s name in the recent calls and the student cannot bring themselves to pick up.
And in that silence, something breaks. Not dramatically. Quietly. The way things break when no one is watching.
05 — What India Refuses to Say Out Loud
India has a system that selects approximately 17,000 students per year for IIT — out of roughly 1.2 million who appear for the exam. The acceptance rate is 1.4 percent.
India does not have a problem with this number. India has a problem with the students who cannot survive pursuing it.
The conversation that never happens is this: the system is not designed for 1.2 million students to have a good outcome. It is designed for 17,000. The other 11,83,000 are, from the system’s perspective, raw material that did not yield. They are not failed by the system. The system is working exactly as intended. They are simply not the output the system was built to produce.
To say this out loud is to say that the entire apparatus — the coaching industry worth ₹58,000 crore, the social pressure, the family sacrifice, the years of preparation — is built on a foundation that requires the overwhelming majority of its participants to lose.
India does not want to say this. So instead, it installs window grills and calls it mental health support. It creates helpline numbers that nobody calls because nobody in Kota is going to call a helpline when they cannot even call their parents.
And every year, in July and August and September, the number appears in a news article. And every year, the article is read, and then forgotten, and then next year there is another article with another number.
There is a child somewhere in India right now who has been told that Kota is the path. Who believes it, because the people who love them believe it. Who will board a train in the next few months and arrive in a city that will ask everything of them and offer nothing back except a rank.
This post will not reach them in time to change that.
But maybe it reaches the person who sent them. And maybe that person, for the first time, sits with the question that nobody in this entire conversation has been willing to ask:
At what point does a dream for your child become a weight your child cannot carry?
You already know the answer. You have known it for a while. You just did not have permission to say it.
You do now.
