The much-talked-about Super-30 initiative, under which Bihar’s 30 underprivileged students are coached free to crack IIT-JEE every year, is set to be replicated by the Punjab, Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh governments for native aspirants.
Bihar’s Super-30 is funded by Patna’s Ramanujan School of Mathematics which is run by famous maths wizard Anand Kumar. Altogether 182 Super-30 students have cracked IIT-JEE till date.
Senior TN-cadre IAS official Chandrakant Kamle has been made coordinator of the TN project to replicate Kumar’s experiment. A team of Kamle’s officials was in Patna recently to study Kumar’s model.
“The TN government has invited our team to Chennai on April 20 to help them set up similar coaching institutes for select poor students,†Kumar told TOI over phone from New Delhi.
Kumar has received a smilar invite from Chhattisgarh government’s additional HRD secretary Vinod Saxena. “The Chhattisgarh government has decided to set up such coaching centres for students from rural and tribal background,†Kumar said and added he would be imparting professional training to the teachers of these proposed centres.
Punjab chief minister Prakash Singh Badal has also given the go-ahead to groom 50 poor students for the all-India IIT entrance exam on the pattern of Super-30. The Badal government has already made a budgetary allocation of Rs 1.39 crore for the purpose.
“I recently conducted a test in a private school near Gurgaon for selecting students for free coaching. This school is run by India-born US citizen Sagar Jain,†Kumar said.
After his February 3 meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Kumar had said he would take 60, instead of 30, students on board for free coaching at his Super-30 centre in Patna. “We are going to implement this from 2010-11 academic session,†he told TOI, adding the entrance test for Super-30 would now be held in Lucknow, Agra, Gorakhpur and Varanasi in UP, Ranchi, Bokaro, Dhanbad and Jamshedpur in Jharkhand and Patna, Gaya, Muzaffarpur and Bhagalpur in Bihar.