Training Rural Students for Premier IIT colleges

The program: Avanti Learning Centers, an award-winning social enterprise set up by IIT Bombay graduates, has partnered with Vidya Poshak to select about 45 bright students from north Karnataka and provide them free training in Class XI and XII for the IIT-JEE. The program will be conducted using technology to bring the expert tutors sessions to Vidya Poshak students as well as peer learning techniques that enable a class to move forward using multitude of skills of students.

Profile of students: Every year Vidya Poshak gets more than 1500 applications for scholarship from 10th grade passed students. In these, at least 40 % have scored more than 90%. These bright kids might aspire to go to premier institutions such as IIT, NIT, IISc etc. but are unable due to lack of guidance and coaching. Vidya Poshak wanted to help such bright but economically challenged students to aim for and get into premier institutions. In the current 2015-17 batch we have a total of 35 students with 10 girl students.  22 of the students are from homes with annual income below INR 2,00,000/- (INR Two Lakhs) . The others are slightly above that limit but not much. Nearly half the students have studied in vernacular medium of instructions till their 10th grade.

Achievements / Journey so far: 

It’s been an interesting journey so far for Vidya Poshak. In order to select the initial set of 39 students, we conducted tests for approximately 400 students. However, a major lesson we learnt was that just the ability to score well does not make an IIT aspirant! Several  of our early students left within two months claiming that the additional burden of IIT coaching was difficult to bear.

Quite a few of our students are from Kannada medium and the instructions in English were hard to follow for them. Consequently they took time to come up to speed even though they were the selected few from hundreds of students who had appeared and failed our assessment test. After six months we are seeing a fantastic transformation in our students. Two of our students scored highest in the first Major Test for 11th grade students across Avanti classes in entire India. 4 of our students were in the 35 students who scored in 150-179 marks range. Today, our batch stands in the top 25 percentile across entire national level classes of 11th grade.

The Future:  Vidya Poshak is thrilled as is Avanti about the success so far of our experiment at Dharwad. We are looking forward to starting a new batch in the academic year 2016-17 that will aim to get into IIT in mid-2018.