Training Student to make them Best 30
Superman of the talented and poor
Around 500,000 applicants appeared for IIT-JEE in 2011 with a dream of securing one of the 10,000 coveted spots in an Indian Institute of Technology. One in 50 made it. Every year, the fierce competition among aspirants is, perhaps, surpassed only by the competition among the innumerable coaching centres nationally, thriving on the back of youthful aspiration.
Now imagine this. In this modern-day ‘survival of the fittest’ someone steps into the jungle to propose something crazy: he will start a coaching centre in Bihar where he will accept 30 talented students every year, strictly from a low-income background and prepare them for the IIT-JEE. Given the 2 per cent success rate of mostly privileged and well-coached aspirants, what can be expected from these 30 candidates?
Bhai ( named changed) along with two colleagues, started just such a ‘Super 30’ in Patna, Bihar, as a programme of the Ramanujan School of Mathematics. In the first batch of 2003, 18 students got into an IIT. For the past four years, starting with 2008, all 30 alumni of Super 30 have cracked IIT-JEE. The success rate over the last nine years, a gravity-defying 236 out of 270, almost 90 per cent! And it bears repeating — all underprivileged students.
How does Super 30 repeat this improbability with such regularity? First, and perhaps most importantly, by believing that raw talent follows the laws of probabilistic distribution that economic disadvantage cannot fully blunt. Smart people are everywhere, opportunities are not.
Tactically, Super 30 has two distinct phases: identify talent from the low socio-economic strata, and provide them one or two years of free boarding, food, and of course, coaching. Evening tuition classes for the relatively wealthier ‘intermediate’ students, support the programme.
Between two to three thousand students apply every year to Super 30, mostly from Bihar, UP and Jharkhand. Super 30 charges Rs 50 to cover the
Around 500,000 applicants appeared for IIT-JEE in 2011 with a dream of securing one of the 10,000 coveted spots in an Indian Institute of Technology. One in 50 made it. Every year, the fierce competition among aspirants is, perhaps, surpassed only by the competition among the innumerable coaching centres nationally, thriving on the back of youthful aspiration.
Now imagine this. In this modern-day ‘survival of the fittest’ someone steps into the jungle to propose something crazy: he will start a coaching centre in Bihar where he will accept 30 talented students every year, strictly from a low-income background and prepare them for the IIT-JEE. Given the 2 per cent success rate of mostly privileged and well-coached aspirants, what can be expected from these 30 candidates?
Bhai ( named changed) along with two colleagues, started just such a ‘Super 30’ in Patna, Bihar, as a programme of the Ramanujan School of Mathematics. In the first batch of 2003, 18 students got into an IIT. For the past four years, starting with 2008, all 30 alumni of Super 30 have cracked IIT-JEE. The success rate over the last nine years, a gravity-defying 236 out of 270, almost 90 per cent! And it bears repeating — all underprivileged students.
How does Super 30 repeat this improbability with such regularity? First, and perhaps most importantly, by believing that raw talent follows the laws of probabilistic distribution that economic disadvantage cannot fully blunt. Smart people are everywhere, opportunities are not.
Tactically, Super 30 has two distinct phases: identify talent from the low socio-economic strata, and provide them one or two years of free boarding, food, and of course, coaching. Evening tuition classes for the relatively wealthier ‘intermediate’ students, support the programme.
Between two to three thousand students apply every year to Super 30, mostly from Bihar, UP and Jharkhand. Super 30 charges Rs 50 to cover the