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?

Anand Kumar, 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 cost of conducting a specially designed test for math, physics and chemistry, based on standard NCERT textbooks of class IX or X. Questions that judge ‘thinking capacity’ and pattern-oriented abilities, not factual knowledge, are included.

Performers above a cut-off are invited for an interview, primarily to weed out those who may not be low income. “Applicants from a government school are definitely underprivileged. We ask for the father and mother’s occupation. We see if they are wearing Reebok shoes or an expensive watch,” explained Kumar.

Curiously, Super 30’s selectivity is 1 in 100, doubly more stringent than IIT-JEE’s. Limited by their carrying capacity, are they denying many deserving candidates? Kumar admits there is room for further inclusion, “From 2013 we will take in 40-50. But it is difficult to find 100-200.” Why? Surely, there are many more talented poor students aspiring to be in IITs in such a large, three-state catchment area?

Kumar offered an insight in­to a larger problem, “Many of the talented poor students dr­op out before reaching Class X.” By now a celebrated speake­r at many national and international conferences, Kumar invoked China, “They identify talent in the sixth class at the village level. At the last six International Math Olympiads, China won the gold medal. We should also be looking for talent much earlier.”

Super 30’s coaching phase, not unlike other coaching outfits, is marked by a lot of brute test-taking practice. However, th­ere are important differen­ces. A key challenge for Su­per 30 is to help their students bu­ild self-confidence. Kumar described an innovation, “We­’ve developed two cartoon ch­aracters. Ricky is suited-b­oo­ted, gets dropped off in a car. Bholu wears torn chappals and rides a rickety cycle to sc­hool. But when it comes to so­lving problems, Ricky solves in one standard way. Bholu does it in many creative ways. He generalises.”

The medium of instruction at Super 30 is Hindi and not English as one might expect. Problem-solving, though, is in English so the students become sufficiently proficient for tests. There are no inputs to improve spoken English. So what happens in the IITs where the medium is strictly English? “We can’t teach ev­e­rything. For a year or so, our st­udents face some difficulty. Af­ter that they pick up.”

Kumar’s path-breaking wo­rk at Super 30 has brought him face-to-face with the who’s who, from Big B to the prime minister, chief minister, HRD minister and President. Many offer funding, which Super 30 does not take on principle. “As soon as we start taking donations, we get the wrong kind of attention. People start bad-mouthing us, that this is a way to make money, that we are thieves,” reasons Kumar.

When asked how he sees his work spreading nationally, Kumar responds tellingly, “Eve­ryone wants to help us gr­ow our work. That we sh­ould do more. No one has yet asked us, ‘How do we take this work forward?’” A natural ma­t­he­matician, who could not act on an opportunity in 1994 to attend Cambridge University due to poverty, has turned his personal loss into his br­et­hren’s gain. Watch this sp­ace for some stories of the Su­per 30 students.

(The writer is a social

entrepreneur and is on the

faculty of IIM-Ahmedabad)

birj.kothari@mydigitalfc.com