It was a humid morning in the lush green campus of one of India’s premier IITs. As the new students were busy registering themselves for their respective departments for M Sc and M Tech courses, their parents, who accompanied them, patiently waited in a hall for the process to complete. A middle-aged couple sat quietly in one corner of the hall where I had parked myself along with my wife. Both looked haggard from a long train journey, his oversized terry cotton shirt and trousers and her synthetic sari crumpled and visibly unclean. Both wore plastic chappals.
Noticing the luggage by their side, I asked the man if they had come straight from the railway station. Both smiled in affirmation, visibly happy that there was someone to talk to. “Have you come for your ‘vidyarthi’ (student)?” the man asked. I told him that my daughter would be doing a post graduation course. “Good, good. The children are doing well,” he said.
His son had taken admission for M Tech. “He got a good rank in GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) and chose this IIT, one of the best in India,” he said. The glint in his eyes exuded paternal pride as he went on to narrate his son’s accomplishments, in the process laying his humble background bare before me. He was a marginal farmer from a rain-fed village in Bihar, earning barely enough to maintain his family.
The teachers in the village primary school, where his son studied, first told the unlettered man that the lad was doing exceptionally well in studies and suggested he should take proper care of his education. His son went to a secondary school few kilometres away from his village and then to a college in a nearby town. After completing Class 12, he got admission into an engineering college.
Though his son studied in government schools and colleges all along and never attended coaching classes, the man sold around a half of his landholding of five acres to fund the son’s education. But he had no regrets. “I will sell all my land if required. I only wish that he becomes a highly educated man and moves away from the vicious poverty trap that we are in,” he said. Such success stories are still being scripted in India, thanks to public funded institutes of excellence like IITs. Poor parents who sacrifice everything to make their children educated still hope for a brighter future despite all odds. Can this happen if India goes for complete privatisation of the education system in the future? I have my doubts.
Email: sahupriyaranjan@gmail.com