With a sprawling five-acre campus, 10,000 students and state-of-the-art LCD projectors in its lecture rooms, Bansal Classes is bigger and slicker than most schools in India.

But the institution, now a landmark in Kota, a city in Rajasthan, is neither a school nor a college. It is the jewel in the crown of India's private coaching industry, a $6.4 billion business that widens the social divide.

Cram schools have become a magnet for tens of thousands of mostly middle-class families in a country where two decades of rapid economic growth have failed to improve a dysfunctional state education system and a shortage of good universities.

Such cram schools coach students for fiercely competitive entrance tests to a handful of premier technical and medical colleges.

Their modus operandi is rote learning.

At Bansal's, hundreds of teenagers are trained intensively to solve complex multiple-choice questions on physics, chemistry or mathematics.

Text: Diksha Madhok, Reuters

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