The Rajasthan Government will develop an online database of students preparing for competitive examinations in Kota.
The project is, in effect, an online students register. According to Ashok Gehlot’s office, which announced the approval, Kota draws close to two lakh aspirants from across the country, and the state wants their addresses, hostels and coaching enrolments on one system before the next admission season.
Online students register: Ashok Gehlot’s plan for Kota’s two lakh aspirants
The Chief Minister cleared the proposal in the first days of April 2021, Deccan Herald reported, with the project estimated at Rs 68 lakh. The register is to come with a web portal and a mobile app through which students can raise problems with coaching, housing or meals, and the official statement said similar registers would follow for other cities with coaching institutes.
Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot approved the budget of Rs 68 lakh for the initiative. “A record of students studying in the city from across the country will be made. The step to be taken to make essential arrangements for students preparing for competitive examinations in Kota during the pandemic”, read the official statement.
A database with particulars of the students’ address, a hostel or PG details, family information as well as coaching centre details will be developed by the RajCamp Info Services Limited (RISL).
Who builds it
RISL, formally RajCOMP Info Services Limited, is a company fully owned by the Government of Rajasthan that delivers IT systems, web development and database work for state departments, according to its own site. Routing the register through RISL keeps the data inside government rather than with a private vendor, and puts the build alongside the state’s other e-governance systems.
What each record is meant to hold, and the facility the Chief Minister’s office links to it:
| Field | Linked facility in the statement |
|---|---|
| Student’s address | A record of students from across the country |
| Hostel or PG details | Housing issues routed through the portal |
| Family information | Notifications pushed to parents’ phone numbers |
| Coaching centre details | Attendance and timetables visible to parents |
The online portal will address the issues pertaining to students such as coaching, housing and meals. The Department of Information Technology and Communication received the approved plan to prepare the database of around two lakh students for a grievance redressal portal.
The statement released by the CM’s office further said that “the city has around 3,000 hostels, 25,000 paying guest accommodations and 1,800 student kitchen facilities. Parents can also access the register to know about their children’s attendance and time tables at the coaching centres. The facility to send important notifications to the parent’s phone numbers will be available.”
The portal side of the project matters as much to the state as the database. Students’ complaints about coaching, housing and meals currently travel through collectors’ offices and helplines; the plan approved by Gehlot routes them through one system tied to the register, so that a complaint arrives attached to a verified address and institute. The statement also promises parents a window into the system, with attendance records, timetables and alerts pushed to registered phone numbers.
Why Kota needed a register
The city’s scale makes the case for an online students register: according to Ashok Gehlot’s statement, Kota runs on roughly 3,000 hostels, 25,000 paying guest rooms and 1,800 mess kitchens, and nobody has held a single list of who lives where. The gap showed in April 2020, when the first lockdown stranded coaching students in the city for weeks; Uttar Pradesh alone counted more than 30,000 of its students stuck in Kota, a figure its Chief Minister cited when launching his own state’s free coaching scheme this February.
The pandemic also showed what is at stake for the town itself. When classrooms shut in 2020, Swarajya reported that the city’s coaching economy, estimated in that report at about Rs 1,200 crore, had crumbled with around one lakh livelihoods hit.
The city serves as a major coaching hub of India for students preparing for competitive entrance examinations. With more than big and small coaching institutes, the annual turnover of the industry crosses Rs 3000 crore.
Deccan Herald’s report puts the trade in sharper numbers: about ten big coaching institutes and fifty smaller ones work the city, and the industry’s annual turnover is above Rs 3,000 crore. For the hostels, mess contractors and transport operators built around that trade, a government register doubles as a market census.
None of those businesses is registered against the students it houses or feeds, which is the gap the register is designed to close. A verified list of two lakh residents, refreshed each admission cycle, would give the district administration the same visibility over the student city that it already has over schools and colleges, and give parents several hundred kilometres away a daily account of attendance.
What has happened since
Oversight of coaching towns has moved up the agenda in the years after the approval. In January 2024 the Union Ministry of Education circulated model guidelines for the regulation of coaching centres to all states, dated 16 January 2024, which ask centres to register before operating, renew that registration, keep prescribed records and registers, cap coaching at five hours a day, and enrol nobody below 16 years of age or before the secondary school examination.
The welfare thread runs through the central text as well: it asks centres to set up counselling systems, run mental health workshops, give students a weekly day off and stop segregating batches by academic performance. A register of who studies where, the idea Rajasthan priced at Rs 68 lakh in 2021, is the administrative floor under all of it.
The central text leaves the machinery to the states, which is where the 2021 themes, from the online students register and Ashok Gehlot’s grievance portal to the Kota hostel count, now sit inside a national framework rather than a single city’s experiment.
