KOCHI: How much can a single person, without the backing of any religious group, contribute to the welfare of society? A lot, in the long run - as Dr Rajith Kumar has shown in the span of the past 4 or 5 years. A lecturer by profession, he has been single-handedly offering free coaching classes, counselling sessions, food, uniforms, textbooks, medicines, even blood, to economically backward students, whose number has crossed 25,000 now. Unbelievable as it seems, the funds for all this are generated from his own salary.
Dr Rajith, currently a lecturer of Botany at the Kalady Sree Sankara College, now concentrates mostly on offering free counselling classes to schools and colleges. “I had a troubled childhood and youth myself, and given my circumstances, I might have become a goonda or a wastrel. I don’t want any other youngster to suffer the lack of economic and emotional support that I had to go through,” he says. All the same, Dr Rajith passed his MSc with a rank, PhD with a gold medal and cleared the UGC Net exam, supporting himself by giving tuitions.
Dr Rajith initially joined as lecturer at the Kalady College. Later he took a transfer to his home town, Thiruvananthapuram, where he became a teacher in the unobtrusive school where he studied, the Attingal Boys Higher Secondary School, relinquishing the UGC scale of pay. By this time, he was a life-member of the Red Cross Society of India, and had taken part in several training programmes conducted by the NCERT and SCERT in Adolescent Education. The extent of his activities, conducted under the voluntary programme - Dr Rajith Charitable Services, is unbelievable. The programmes he has introduced range from free model medical entrance tests for students, a staff directory for the school, the first of its kind, several ever-rolling trophies for the school, eye-testing camps and inter-collegiate quiz competitions. For his efforts, he was rewarded, but not before they generated hostility from a section of his co-workers, who had him transferred to a faraway district. But he was transferred back soon, and the Education Department, under the initiative of James Varghese IAS, granted him special permission to conduct free coaching classes for deserving students in off-hours.
But Dr Rajith had had enough of the institution and decided to take a transfer back to Kalady College. So far he has conducted classes in more than 60 educational institutions in and around Kochi. The Government of India awarded him the Samoohya Saksharatha Prathibha Award in 2009. He was selected as a Thiruvananthapuram District Panchayat Working Group Member and is going to convene the ‘Keralagramam’ of the Indian Science Congress Programme to be held in the district in January 2010.
“The principal of the Kalady Sankara College, Dr M K Ramachandran and the staff are very supportive, and I hope to do a lot more,” he says. “Because at the end of the day, that is how I want to be known, a person who is an asset to society, who is waiting for opportunities to do good.” Dr Rajith can be contacted at 9895166639 or at rajithattingal@gmail.com.