TOI, 5 June 2009, Jinka Nagaraju,TNN
Article Link
HYDERABAD: The real performers, they say, never advertise themselves. While corporate colleges have been shouting from roof-tops about the toppers in IITs and other professional colleges hey have been churning out year after year, it is actually a small five-room building tucked away in the remote New Nagole in Greater Hyderabad that has been making history, silently.
The Andhra Pradesh Social Welfare Residential Junior College trains students, mostly children of the poorest of the poor and destitutes for engineering courses. Of the 35 students this year, 19 secured top ranks in the IIT-JEE including seven students making it to one of the IITs in the country. Twelve of them are set to get admitted to either the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research located in Bhopal, Kolkata, Mohali, Pune and Thiruvananthapuram, or the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology at Thiruvananthapuram, whose chancellor is the missile man of India and former President A P J Abdul Kalam.
All the remaining students of the 35-member batch of this year are also in line to secure admission in B.Tech courses of various universities in the state. Of the 19 students who got the ranks, 15 are SCs, one is ST, two are OBCs and one is from the general category.
These are the real success stories in the truest sense of the word, as each student carries a pathetic story of poverty behind him. The majority of the students are children of cattle-grazers of landlords or farm labourers. All the students spent their early childhood in the farms rearing cattle or doing odd-jobs. Take B Chinna Raidu, who secured the 464th rank in IIT this year. He is the son of poor and illiterate daily wagers in Nellore district. Y Krishna Veni, who also made it to IIT this year, belongs to Eukala (gypsy) community from Kurnool district. B Eswar Rao, also an IITian this year, is the son of a construction worker from Prakasam district. K Kiran Kumar, who also made it to B Arch in Delhi School of Planning apart from IIT, is the son of a farm worker from Khammam district. Ramdas, son of a cattle-grazer for a landlord in a Telangana district, made it to Kalam’s institute last year.
A beaming principal E Lakshmaiah modestly attributes the success more to the hard work and determination of the students than the alma mater. “The facilities are bare minimum here. But despite that, our students succeeded in the highly competitive nations-wide tests,” he said. “Our success rate is 100 per cent. If more than 60 per cent secured admission into nationally reputed institutes like IIT and NIT, the remaining got selected to other best colleges in the state,” said the principal. The college is run by the social welfare department of the state government while the funding comes from the department of rural development. The students are selected from the various colleges run by the social welfare department through a written test. Once picked, they are given long-term coaching along with intermediate education. “These students hail from poorest of the poor families. It is no mean achievement to secure admission into IITs and other institutes,” said V Nagi Reddy, principal secretary, social welfare.
Buoyed by the 100 per cent success story, the social welfare department now wants to expand the programme to coaching for the medical and law streams from next year. This is education in the real sense from which many a corporate college can take a leaf out of.
