Intense competition is sparking the rise of alcoholism, cannabis addiction, gaming and gang violence in Kota, Rajasthan. Smoking a heady concoction of tobacco and cannabis, 17-year-old Shubham Goyal roams the streets of Kota in the western Indian state of Rajasthan. Goyal had moved to Kota — India’s biggest hub of coaching centers for competitive examinations — in 2018. He had dreams of cracking the entrance test to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the country’s premier engineering schools that count among their alumni Google’s Sundar Pichai and billionaire investor Vinod Khosla. After just a few months, though, he tells his friends at a roadside tea stall, he has lost all hope of clearing the exam and plans to move back to his hometown of Bhilwara, also in Rajasthan. A minor, he casually lights a joint, puffs and passes it to a friend. No one bats an eyelid. Kota attracts more than 150,000 students every academic year, some as young as 12 years of age, mostly prodded by aspirations of middle-class Indian parents to see their kids enter the prestigious IITs or the country’s top medical schools for undergraduate studies. But for most, those dreams come crashing against extraordinarily difficult odds. Only 11,942 out of 1.2 million student candidates cleared the IIT entrance exam in 2018 — that’s a ratio of 1:100, which is five times tougher than Harvard’s admission rate. That intense competition has spawned an industry of coaching institutes in Kota that, according to projections from 2012 Asian Development Bank (ADB) data, today has an annual turnover of $230 to $250 million. But coupled with parental expectations back home, the competition also is increasingly sparking the parallel rise of alcoholism, cannabis addiction, gaming and, at the extreme end of the spectrum, gang violence, as coping mechanisms among students. Where Kota had one de-addiction center in 2009, it now has five to cater to the growing demand. The police seized 115 kilograms of cannabis — which is illegal across India — in the city last year, and according to Deepak Bhargav, Kota’s superintendent of police, they registered more than 20 cases involving narcotics in 2018. | 