Patna, April 27: Teaching has always been a noble profession. With the private coaching institutes mushrooming in the city, now it is lucrative too.

There are around 3,500 private coaching institutes in the city. Most of them train students to crack IIT-JEE and medical entrance examinations.

The authorities have taken the mushrooming of training institutes in a positive stride. As Patna does not have too many public sector industries, it is the perfect place to be converted into a coaching hub. The human resource development (HRD) department is planning to open coaching centres in government schools.

“We are interested in promoting coaching centres. We are planning to make government schools available for coaching classes after the schools get over,” said Anjani Kumar Singh, principal secretary, HRD department.

But all is not well with the emerging coaching “industry”. To begin with, only 634 of the coaching institutes are registered with the district administration though it is compulsory for all.

“The reason for asking coaching institutes to get registered was to protect students from getting duped by various schemes of these centres,” said Patna district magistrate Sanjay Kumar Singh. He added that the administration conducts raids and shuts down centres that have not registered themselves.

But the action has obviously not worked. New coaching institutes up shutters every day.

According to the rules, coaching centres have to provide certain facilities, including drinking water and toilets, to students. They must also inform the students about the details of the courses being taught and the qualification of the teachers.

Sources said there were vast differences between different coaching institutes. While the big and famous ones on Boring Road and Boring Canal Road were no different from offices of corporate houses, the smaller centres in Patna City, Kankerbagh and Rajendra Nagar operate out of a single room. Some of them do not even have a toilet for girl students.

Worse are the coaching institutes for banking and railway board examination, as most of their students have middle-class or rural background.

Quality, as we know, hardly ever goes hand-in-hand with quantity. Students claim only a handful of coaching centres provide quality teaching.

“You will hardly find good teachers for all subjects at a single coaching centre. One has a good physics teacher, another has a good math teacher, and a third one has a good chemistry teacher,” said an engineering aspirant.

IIT-JEE aspirant Vishal Gupta said: “Even teachers of a subject are good only in their sphere of interest. A physics teacher with a profound knowledge of mechanics may not be good at thermodynamics or fluid mechanics at all. As a result, most of them fail to complete the syllabus on time.”

It is no surprise then that their rate of success is nothing to write home about. Sources said around 2,000 take the IIT-JEE entrance exam each year in the city but only about 200 qualify. That’s about 10 per cent.

Rohit Srivastava, a teacher at a city-based coaching centre, said: “The problem is that most teachers, who have been in this profession for a decade or so, do not upgrade themselves. As a result, they can hardly help the students.”

The worst accusation, however, is the coaching centres use false propaganda to attract students. For instance, Patna resident Sachin Agarwal, who ranked 23rd in the IIT-JEE entrance, 2010, had trained for two years at Bansal Classes in Kota. But as soon as the results were published, a number of coaching institutes in the city, in an effort to attract students, claimed that Sachin was their student.