BANGALORE: In the last six years, Anand Kumar of 'Super 30' fame has sent 154 out of 180 of his students to the Indian Institutes of Technology in the country, a premier institution for engineering.
The Bihar based educator's Ramanujan School of Mathematics is widely known as the Super 30 coaching centre. On Tuesday, he was awarded the Prof Yashwantrao Kelkar Yuva Puraskar at the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) conference being held in the city.
"Since childhood, I wanted to be a scientist and my heroes were scientists and not actors," said Kumar, accepting the award. "Later, when I wanted to pursue higher education at a reputed university, I couldn't afford it."
He said he did not get disheartened. "I decided not to go into government service and do something that would help poor students like me get good education," he said.
"So, we designed a programme for the underprivileged meritorious students aspiring for IITJEE and thus came Super 30, with 30 students every year."
Kumar had an offer from the University of Cambridge to pursue higher education in mathematics in 1994. "But financial constraints of my family proved a barrier," he said.
Talking about the incident where he was shot at, he said it only strengthened his resolve.
"Our students studied 14 hours a day and the number of them cracking the IITJEE increased from 18 to 30 by 2008," he said.
Kumar said he has approached the Centre for support, but was yet to hear from them.
"My dream is to expand my student base from 30 every year to more and open branches in every state where poor and meritorious students who cannot afford good education can get higher education and contribute to India," he said.