Should the Centre be running online coaching classes for entrance to engineering and management institutions? No — and the reasons are many. First, any supplementary teaching from external sources is ultimately detrimental to the official channels of higher education. It uses up the time and resources of students as well as teachers, and prevents them from giving their best to where they are supposed to be officially attending classes or teaching. Ideally, what students are taught at college or university should suffice, supplemented by their own efforts. Coaching, either by government-approved staff or private tutorial homes, should be unnecessary. Second, by legitimizing coaching in this manner the government will only encourage competition among tutorial services, and students will definitely go for classes that promise better success. Third, by doing the bulk of the teaching online, a huge section of applicants will be severely disadvantaged because of its lack of access to computers and the internet. Rural and suburban India, and underprivileged students in the cities, remain inadequately computerized in India. Endorsing this inequality will turn these institutions ‘elitist’ in the worst sense of the word.

Finally, the human resource development ministry’s eagerness to initiate such a project does smack of its usual tendency to control the running of these institutions. The ministry has always been deeply uncomfortable about granting them real autonomy, and involving itself in such a project, with apparent concern over private tuition, is perhaps a way of retaining some sort of control over them. Let the institutions decide and implement, if at all, how they want to help students get into them. And this, without unduly taxing their own already-overtaxed resources and compromising their core academic duties. It is best if the State kept out of this business altogether.