Why I built The Phenol Institute in Rajkot — not Ahmedabad, not Kota
An honest essay on the operating economics, cultural fit and student needs that made Rajkot — Saurashtra's largest city — the right base for a chemistry-first coaching institute.
Every Indian SME founder hears the same question from younger entrepreneurs in the third meeting: don't you want to move the business to Ahmedabad, or Mumbai, or Bangalore? For an education business specifically, the variant is: shouldn't a serious coaching institute be in Kota, or in one of the metros? I have been asked this perhaps a hundred times. The answer is plain: I built The Phenol Institute in Rajkot precisely because of where the students were, where the gap was, and what Saurashtra deserved. Here is the honest version of that thinking.
Saurashtra's students go to Kota and don't always come back
Year after year, bright NEET and JEE aspirants from Rajkot, Jamnagar, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and the smaller towns of Saurashtra travel a thousand kilometres north-east to Kota to study chemistry for entrance exams. The economics of that decision are brutal. Hostel, mess, coaching fees, biannual flights home, and the emotional cost of a sixteen-year-old living away from family at a critical age. Some students thrive there. Many do not. And the ones who do not — return home a year or two later with their results, their confidence and sometimes their mental health damaged.
The honest reality is that the Saurashtra student pipeline does not need to travel to Kota to get serious coaching. The chemistry that needs to be taught for NEET is exactly the chemistry that can be taught in Rajkot — by a qualified teacher, in a focused classroom, with the same audit-grade test discipline that any Kota institute claims. What is missing in Rajkot is not the student. It is the institute. So I built it.
The operating economics in a Tier-2 city actually work
Rents, hostel costs, faculty costs and operating overheads in Rajkot are a fraction of what they are in a Mumbai or a Kota. That arithmetic does two things. One — it lets the institute offer fees that an actual middle-class Saurashtra family can afford without mortgaging the household. Two — it lets the institute keep batch sizes small, because the unit economics do not demand cramming students into auditorium classrooms.
Most coaching institutes in metros operate on the maths of high rent, high fees, large batch sizes and aggressive marketing. The chemistry that the student receives in that economic model is rarely the chemistry they need. In Rajkot, the same fees buy a small batch, taught by the founder, with a personal test review and a real mentorship desk. That is not a marketing claim — it is the only operating model the city economics allow.
The cultural fit is the part nobody discusses
Saurashtra families approach a child's NEET or JEE year differently from a Delhi or Mumbai family. The decision is collective — parents, grandparents, the maternal uncle, the older cousin who cleared the medical college. The conversation happens at home, in Gujarati, with everyone in the room. The institute that serves these families well is the one that can sit down with the whole room and have the conversation in their language, with their cultural references, with respect for the way the family actually makes its decisions.
I am from this culture. So is the faculty bench. So is the operations team. When a parent walks in worried about whether the child can clear the cutoff this year, the conversation that happens is honest and culturally grounded. I cannot fake that from a glass office in Ahmedabad and I would not try to. Saurashtra families deserve an institute that meets them where they are.
Online reach lets us teach beyond Rajkot anyway
The YouTube channel — THE PHENOL & THE CATALYST — has nearly 10,000 subscribers and 500+ lectures available free. A student in Junagadh, in Botad, in Surendranagar, in any part of Saurashtra and well beyond, can watch the same chemistry lecture series that runs in the Rajkot classroom. The geography that matters most for a coaching institute in 2026 is not the city of the institute. It is the reach of the teaching. We built the reach on YouTube precisely because the classroom is in Rajkot and we wanted the chemistry to travel further.
What Saurashtra deserves from its own teachers
There is a deeper version of this argument that I rarely make in public. Saurashtra has produced an outsized number of India's most successful first-generation business families. The students of those families — and of the hundreds of thousands of less famous Saurashtra families — deserve teaching that meets them on their level, in their language, with their cultural respect, at fees their families can afford. That has been a structural gap in this region for as long as I have lived here. The Phenol Institute is one small answer to that gap. It is not the only answer the region needs. But it is the one I have been able to build, and I have built it deliberately in Rajkot for exactly the reasons above.
The decision to stay in Rajkot has cost the institute some prestige in the Pan-India coaching market. It has cost us nothing in the student outcomes that actually matter. Eleven hundred MBBS seats over ten years, taught from a chemistry-first classroom in Saurashtra, is the only result I care about. The chemistry is the chemistry, wherever it is taught. The city is the city. Both choices need to be deliberate; both have been.
Got a question on what you've just read — or about preparing for NEET, JEE, GUJCET or CSIR-NET? Write directly to the institute.
First-generation Chemistry educator. M.Sc., Ph.D., CSIR-NET AIR-1. Founder and Director of The Phenol Institute, Rajkot — 1,100+ MBBS placements over ten years of NEET, JEE, GUJCET and Board chemistry coaching.