HYDERABAD: Churning out thousands of successful candidates to get into Indian Institutes of Technology across the country, Hyderabad has outdone Kota in Rajasthan in coaching students build their foundation for the annual Joint Entrance Examination ( JEE ).Besides a large number of coaching centres springing up across the city, Hyderabad is the mecca for lakhs of students every year who come from various parts of the country to fulfil their dream of obtaining a seat in premier engineering and technological institutes.Started in 1987, the coaching industry in Hyderabad boomed in the early 2000s, wherein the number of students seeking coaching grew from a few thousands to a massive 20,000. "Before 1999, there were not many institutes offering IITJEE or Eamcet training. We realised the potential among students and started our junior colleges in 1999 in Dilsukh Nagar, Yousufguda and SR Nagar where we offered students an integrated curriculum for intermediate as well as IIT JEEE amcet," said Sushma Bopanna, academic director of Sri Chaitanya Educational Institutes.From 3,000 students training for JEE in the 90s to over 1.5 lakh this year, Hyderabad has dominated the merit list with almost 50 percent of the top 10 rankers for the past several years. If the results for JEE (advanced) 2016 are anything to go by, then six out of top 10 rankers were from Hyderabad.Although it has been a close race between the two cities, industry experts observe that Hyderabad has clearly dominated the merit list ever since 2006. "The fascination among students in Telangana and AP for JEE has only increased over the years. It is only in the last one decade that there has been a sudden rise in the number of takers. The coaching industry has only catered to the increasing demand," said Dheeraj Kumar Misra, regional director, operations, south zone at Aakash Educational Services Pvt Ltd While in 2006, as many as 938 candidates from Andhra Pradesh and 1,004 from Rajasthan made it to the IITs, in 2016, as many as 3,734 were from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and 1,610 from Rajasthan.Officials from IIT-Madras, under which Hyderabad section falls, state that students from Hyderabad make up for over 20 percent of all those who make it to premier engineering institutes. This has been so for the past several years.Commenting on the dominance of Hyderabad in bagging top ranks in JEE, Bopanna, said, "Unlike Kota, in Hyderabad, we provide foundation training to students at the school level from Class 7 onwards, wherein basic concepts and fundamentals of JEE are taught. The daily routine of a student taking up coaching in Hyderabad is strenuous with more than half the day devoted to an intense study schedule."Few parents consider admission into one of the top coaching institutes in the city to be a passport to IIT. Owing to the frenzy, several coaching institutes in the city also conduct an admission test.However, educationalists don't consider the rigorous coaching at school level as a positive sign."Although students undergo rigorous training, the outcome at IITs is not always positive.Students often do not perform well when they come to IITs as they are trained in a certain manner. Reforms are required at the school level so that coaching for students is not encouraged at such a young age," said Sanjay G Dhande, an educationalist and former director of IIT Kanpur.