Three centres for poor kids record 100% IIT success

PUNE: In Kadus, a sleepy village in Maharashtra's Rajgurunagar town, a handpicked batch of 70 students trained for the past one year for the IIT joint entrance examination (JEE) has achieved a 100% success rate with all of them clearing the mains.
So have 149 students trained at Bundi in Rajasthan (50) and Kottayam (99).

Drawn from as far as Kargil in Jammu & Kashmir and Kerala, the students have one thing in common -all come from an extremely poor background and were trained, for free, by an organisation called Dakshana Foundation, which has been running JEE coaching batches in seven Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) since 2009.

The stories of the students who cleared the exam are heartwarming. Mousumi Das from West Bengal's Nadia, whose parents are daily wage labourers, is the first to have received an education.“Whenever I am home, I coach village children for the JNV entrance exam. I want them to get the opportunity that I have,“ she says.

Preeti Banjare from Janjgir-Champa in Chhattisgarh, an orphan, wants to work for the education of the girl child.

Daughter of a shopkeeper, Lucknow's Shipra Kimari, also a JNV student, cracked the JEE mains with a score of 132. Together, they are among 93 girl students of the JNVs to have cleared the test.

The high success rate of JNV girls -95% (93 out of 98) -comes at a time when the Centre has decided to institute a quota for women students in IITs. The government plans to raise the number of women students at IITs to 20% by 2020.