Cram schools hold key to success

Tens of thousands of Indian high school students come here every year to start a two-year course at one of the cram schools that Kota is famous for.

They hope intense private coaching will help them gain entry into an elite business school, engineering or medical college.

Students like Saurabh Aggarwal live in a tiny room, with no TV or laptop and spend more than 16 hours studying everyday.

It's a huge investment for middle class families who pay up to 3,000 USD for the courses in a country where the average per capita income is less than half that amount.

The returns can be high, though, as a diploma from a good school will guarantee a lifetime's worth of fat pay cheques or a chance to work abroad.

But experts warn that such cram schools intensify the inequalities of a bad education system plagued by high dropout rates.

SOUNDBITE: Director of Assessment Survey Evaluation Research Centre (Aser), Wilima Wadhwa, saying (English)

"More than 50 percent children in grade five cannot read a standard two level text - there is a huge gap in what we expect our children to know and what they actually know. And unless we address this gap, this learning deficit, things are going to get much much worse. You are going to see even more private tuitions and you are going to see more dropouts."

A quarter of Indians are illiterate and lack the skills to match India's growing economic needs.