College for poor churns out IITians

TOI, 5 June 2009, Jinka Nagaraju,TNN
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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.

Keeping Kolkata Klean

Kolkata for a Green Cause, NDTV Video

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IIT dreams come true for Patna students

Viny Mishra, Tuesday May 26, 2009, Patna

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The IIT entrance exam results were declared on Monday and there were many happy children from Patna, who managed to clear the test. The sweet taste of success was felt at "Super 30" coaching institute in Patna. Mathmetician Anand Kumar started this institute in 2003 and every year 30 children from economically weak backgrounds are coached here for one of the toughest examination in the world. And all free of charge.

Says Vishwaraj Kumar, who cleared the exam: "I worked very hard for this.... I want to work for ISRO in the future."

Founder of Super 30 Anand Kumar says: "From this year, I want to pick up 90 students and work with them, I want to help more and more students."

Until last year Anand Kumar used to run super 30 with Abhayanand, who is the Additional Director General of Police in the state.

This year, they parted ways and the police officer set up another coaching institute. But the good news is, all his students too got through to the IIT.

Vikas Kumar, who too cleared the exam, says: "My father is a clerk at the Patna High Court. He has great expectations from me. I am happy I have managed to do well."

It is a giant leap forward for these students. And perhaps the future of many more such aspirants from the poorer sections of society is in safe hands.

Love for green: Healing the hills with trees

EcoWatch
Madhu Bharathi
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Sachidanand Bharti is known as the treeman in Uttarakhand, where he has been dedicatedly planting trees since the last 25 years. He has succeeded in greening about 30000.
Few hills in Uttarakhand were once barren, but now they are lush green, all due to his efforts. Bharti is a school teacher by profession but his real calling is as a climate crusader.

"The holy Ganga emerges from Uttarakhand and nowhere else. So if we do not work dedicatedly and with a pure heart for Uttarakhand, then we will not be able to save it," said Bharti.
Seeing the hills of his childhood turning barren prompted Bharti to use his Sundays for planting trees and soon his mission inspired 15 villages.

"All these hills were barren before without any plants or trees. We started with planting one tree, then two, then three and slowly all the villagers got together and turned this area into a jungle," said Kishan Pandey, a local resident.

Today, more than 25 lakh trees planted by him have created a jungle that supports rivulets.
Sachidanand is now a satisfied man as the hills are green again. However, now his only worry is protecting the forests he created from the timber mafia.

Slum Millionaire

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"Slumdog Millionaire" is the favorite at Sunday's Academy Awards and was largely inspired by a real location, the Dharavi Slum. Seth Doane reports.

A population that thrives in the shadows is now thrust into the international spotlight.
"Yeah! Everyone is speaking about Slumdog Millionaire, Slumdog Millionaire," says Jaison Thangaraj.
The Dharavi slum - the setting for the movie "Slumdog Millionaire" - defies definition.
Even the film's 8-year-old star was shocked by the poverty.
"There are many people who had stayed in road, near gutters - ate near gutters all mosquitoes on their bodies," says actor Ayush Mahesh Khedekar.
It's known as one of Asia's largest slums - about a million people live here, packed into an area that is less than one square mile. Somewhere around 50 percent of Mumbai's population lives in a slum like this one - and while there are the stories of struggling you might expect - there are also ones that might surprise you.

Twenty-one-year-old Jaison Thangaraj grew up here and shares a tiny home with his parents and sister. He's working hard to get out - by studying for an engineering degree.
"It's a mindset for people - Dharavi is just a slum, slum, slum," Jaison says. "Have they ever come and saw this?"
Maybe not before - but the movie generated business for slum tours - "Reality Tours" lets outsiders explore Dharavi.
"It's really shocking how organized it all is - that there are commercial districts and residential and that there is water and electricity - and services...and schools," says Dages Keates of Brooklyn, N.Y.

But, tours are not the only business.
A maze of makeshift homes and 10,000 small businesses generate an annual GDP of more than $600 million - all in an area smaller than New York City's Central Park.
There's gem-stone embroidery, stones chipped to grind grain and a leather industry which employs 40,000 people.
Believe it or not, Dharavi slum means opportunity for some, Doane reports. Some boys make just about $50 a month here making small leather wallets - but there were no jobs at all where they came from.
Two-thirds of India's population lives on less than $2 a day.

In one small shop, kids say that while education would be a way out, their families depend on their earnings.
But earning a million dollars here - even on the Indian TV show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" - seems out of reach.
"The movie is false," says Arvind, who has lived in Dharavi for 40 years. "A guy from Dharavi would never be considered for the show."
When the movie opened here, it sparked scattered protests among those offended by the word "dog" in the title.

"Indians have always been sensitive to the way that Indian poverty and the lack of development among vast sections of the Indian population have been portrayed in cinema," says film critic Nandini Ramnath.
Still, "Slumdog Millionaire" was the 4th-biggest weekend box office opening ever for any Hollywood film released in India. It's the kind of success that Jaison hopes believes could generate hope and investment in a place that could use both.
"Yeah, I'm definitely proud of living here," Jaison says. "I want to change the whole face of Dharavi, you know?"
And that would be a real Hollywood ending.

'I want to slog, earn and eat. I don't need freebies'

Text: Vicky Nanjappa in Shira | Photograph: Dominic Xavier

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Malleshaiah, 55, a farmer from Shira taluk, Chitradurga in Karnataka is one of the very few farmers who still feel that he has to slog it out to earn his bread and butter.

"Stop feeding us with free or subsidized rice. It is only making farmers like us lazier by the day. Every candidate who comes by my house seeking votes, I make it a point to tell him that the promise to give out free rice is not only ridiculous but also ends up causing loss for the government at the end of it.

"I want to slog, earn and eat. I don't need the freebies. All I need is the infrastructure and the basic amenities from the government.

"I know for a fact that in order to fulfil such stupid promises, the government will end up importing rice from other countries. Not only will the government be spending more on this but will also end up killing the Indian market. Apart from importing the rice, they will buy rice from us for more and then sell it for less, which will only add to the burden.

"Once a person realises that he is getting his food cheap and so easily, there is a tendency of sitting back at home and relaxing which in turn will contribute to laziness.

"If the newly elected government has some concern about the people in this area, then let them improve the water facilities in this place. I hope they build small dams so that water can be stored. This will ensure that we can till our fields with no worry and earn and then live on our own strength.

"I feel, in Chitradurga, the BJP has a chance. We have given the Congress enough and more chances and no candidate has addressed the basic problem of water and infrastructure. I think the overall mood in our constituency is to vote for a change and I was told that it is better to have the same governments at the centre and the state level because, work gets implemented sooner."

Meet Pravin Deshmukh, Vidarbha's net-savvy farmer

Piyush Pushpak / CNN-IBN
TimePublished on Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 10:27, Updated on Wed, Sep 12, 2007 at 10:39 in Sci-Tech section
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In a CNN-IBN special series Mera Gaon Mera Bandwidth, we are trying to highlight how the Internet is transforming lives in rural India.

Vidarbha: Forty five-year-old Pravin Deshmukh is the new age farmer of Vidarbha. After suffering heavy losses in cotton farming, and incurring huge debts, a desperate Pravin he turned to what he thought had all the solutions - the Internet.

"On the Internet, I found that turmeric is better than cotton. I got so much information, and ideas,” says Pravin.
The journey from cotton fields to turmeric for the net-savvy farmer has truly been an incredible one. He used the worldwide web to come out of the suicide web that cotton farming brings in this part of the world. Pravin is now spreading the good word.

Pravin has doubled his profits in just one year. Now, he travels from village to village, holding chaupals for other farmers and introducing the Internet to them too.
"It's encouraging that it worked for him. Years of cotton farming has only caused suicides. Maybe his technology will change this,” says a cotton farmer, Vishwas Anandrao Pandey.
In the last five years over 3,000 cotton farmers have killed themselves in Vidarbha. Pravin says the Internet didn't just help him make profits. It also saved his life.