A school of hope

Sons and daughters of farm labourers, rickshaw pullers and other daily wage earners regularly get into the IITs and IIMs from the state-run Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, where education is absolutely free. Many of them then go on to join the IAS, MNCs like McKinsey and even organisations like NASA. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Pradip Patil, 30, hails from a family of poor farmers in Latur. His father eked out an existence for himself and his family on less than two acres of not-so-fertile land. Patil’s future, like those of millions of youngsters from similar backgrounds, looked bleak—but for one crucial difference. His father had sent him to Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV) in Turajpur in Maharashtra. He went from there to an engineering college in the state. Today, he works as a consultant with Tata Consultancy Services in Mumbai.

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Banwari Verma, 19, is the son of a mason. His family income: a measly Rs 1,200-1,300 per month. As in Patil’s case, JNV was his ticket out of a life of grinding poverty. Today, he is a third year student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Big deal, one might think. There are thousands of schools that prepare children from underprivileged backgrounds for a better life. What’s special about JNV?

More than 3 lakh students study at the 576 JNVs across the country. A majority of these students hail from poor and underprivileged backgrounds. The typical profiles of parents who send their children to JNV are: rickshaw pullers, masons, landless labourers and daily wage earners. About 27 of fathers of JNVians have daily incomes of Rs 35 or less. Over 74 per cent of students are from rural India and the fathers of 40 per cent of these children have studied only up to Class VII.

Several JNVians have travelled down the rags-to-riches path. Now, many of them are sparing time to help out other poor children at their alma mater. “Like us, most students in JNV are from poor, rural backgrounds. Their parents don’t have much education. So, they don’t know about careers they can pursue. We thought it was our duty to counsel our young brothers about the new opportunities in the outside world,” said Patil.

“It is our duty to guide and inspire these students as such guidance may not be forthcoming from their families,” said Vimbishar Naik, a JNVian, who works as a senior manager at Infosys Technologies in Bangalore.

These efforts are bearing fruit. “Following such counselling, which began a few years ago, the number of students getting into IITs from JNV Jaipur alone has increased from two every year to 5-7,” said Verma. In 2008, there were 800 students from the JNVs studying in the seven IITs.

“I hadn’t even heard about IIT till a teacher told me to fill up a form for the IIT-JEE. I studied for four months and cracked the exam. I wouldn’t have made the cut without JNV and the mentoring system put in place by its alumni,” he told HT, recalling that his father had to borrow money to send him for JNV entrance test on insistence of a teacher in his village school.

About 1,000 JNV alumni have come forward to help out with this project to groom young JNVians for life outside their school.

Today, there are JNV alumnus in senior positions at McKinsey & Co., Citibank and several other Indian and foreign companies.