It’s unlikely that any visitor to India’s coaching hub, Kota in Rajasthan, would have missed seeing the huge signboards of ALLEN Career Institute. Started in 1988 with less than 10 students, the institute became a dominant player in the engineering and medical entrance test coaching industry with 200,000 students a year across 46 centres, 15 of them in Kota alone.
The going was more than good, until the pandemic struck in March 2020 — right before the new batches of students were to arrive in April and May. Entrance exams were put off. And overnight, Kota became deserted. The in-classroom