Plea in Supreme Court seeks an end to ‘coaching Raj’, dummy school nexus

Published 3 July 2026 · health

A petition seeking to end India’s “coaching Raj” and the framing of a national framework designed to eradicate “dummy school” nexus affecting children’s mental health

A petition seeking to end India’s “coaching Raj” and the framing of a national framework designed to eradicate “dummy school” nexus affecting children’s mental health is set to be listed in the Supreme Court. Urging the court to protect the sanctity of the fundamental right to equal educational opportunities, the writ petition filed by advocate Narendra Kumar Goswami said the state cannot run schools by day and “surrender children to coaching factories by night”. The present system creates a brutal two-tier structure. One India goes to expensive coaching centres, buys curated material, mock tests, analytics, faculty access and examination strategy. The other India sits in ordinary schools, follows the prescribed syllabus, and is then told to compete in examinations for which the schooling system itself has not adequately prepared it.

This is not equality. It is a state-manufactured inequality,” the petitioner submitted. The writ plea urged the court to direct government and other authorities to “dismantle the parallel, unregulated, fee-driven private coaching ecosystem” and align the curriculum and testing patterns of national entrance examinations such as JEE, NEET, CLAT, CUET, SSC, etc. with State-prescribed school syllabus. Goswami argued that the phenomenon of dummy schools involves the formal enrollment of children in CBSE or State board schools, but, in reality, they do not attend regular schooling and are instead kept in coaching centres for extremely long hours. “This is a fraud on schooling, a fraud on the child, and a fraud on Article 21A [right to education]. The dummy-school nexus confines children to coaching centres for 14–16 hours a day and directly assaults their physical and mental health,” the petition said.

The petitioner-advocate said the extreme stress caused by the overwhelming presence of the private coaching regime was a “national constitutional emergency” affecting millions of children and youth, particularly those from poor, rural, SC/ST/OBC/EWS and first-generation learner families. It alleged there was a nexus among private coaching centres, dummy schools, entrance examination bodies and regulatory inaction. “The Indian State prescribes one school system, but professional destiny is increasingly decided by another system — the private coaching market. In effect, the petition says, the classroom has been displaced by the coaching cubicle, the teacher by the test-series vendor, and the constitutional promise of education by the commercial tyranny of rank,” the petitioner submitted.. Besides the Union government, the petition has arraigned the Testing Agency, CBSE, NCERT, Medical Commission, IIT Council, Bar Council of India, Staff Selection Commission, States, among others.