Bangalore: 28-yr-old spends all his savings On ‘poor’ Students

Bangalore Mirror

Bangalore, 23 May 2011: M G Jayaprakash knows the value of education, how it can change lives. His childhood days were difficult, but now he and his family have put the hard times behind.

 

Jayaprakash, who excelled in studies and went on to do his MS, currently works for the IT giant IBM in Bangalore. He wants other poor children to follow in his path.

 

What makes Jayaprakash’s venture unique is his definition of ‘poor’. At his house in Vijayanagar, which doubles up as a free coaching centre for high school students, preference is given to children who have marks in the range of 35 to 50 per cent.

 

Economic backwardness, though given significant weightage, is by itself not the deciding factor.

 

The idea originally was that of his mother M G Prabhavati, who understood the futility of teaching students already good at studies.

 

Her mission was to teach students who were poor at it. She herself was born in a poor family in Kolar and it was a struggle to get educated. But she managed to complete her degree, married a police constable and came to Bangalore.

 

Watching poor students wandering in the streets and their parents’ helplessness made her start teaching.

 

Within a year, she had turned her home in Vijayanagar into a part-time free school for these kids. The students tutored by Prabhavati did noticeably well in their board exams. Subiya, for instance, an ice-candy seller’s daughter, went on to score 92 per cent in the SSLC exams.

 

Quite a dramatic turnaround considering that the previous year, in ninth standard, she had got only 46 per cent! So too Abhishek, who went on from 42 per cent in ninth standard to 86 per cent in the board exams.

 

Having grown up watching his mother’s dedication in teaching these students, Jayaprakash is building on her good work. He has already invested Rs 15 lakh to take the instituition to the next level. Named Jaihind Academy of Education,  students from classes eight to 12 are taught here.

 

Talking to Bangalore Mirror, Jayaprakash said, “I’m continuing my mother’s dream. I have invested my salary from the past five years to extend our venture. We mainly concentrate on students in SSLC.

 

I can manage to give them free education till this level, but I am worried about their future. I urge people to provide whatever little help they can so that these students can become independent and get a new life.”

 

Two years after he began this endeavour, Jayaprakash’s high school teachers came to know of this and many of them have pitched in to provide free tuition here every week. Jayaprakash has appointed other similar-minded teachers too.

 

None of them work for money. His colleagues at IBM are also impressed and some of them help teach the students English and computers.

 

One wonders if there is a lesson in all this for our rat-race obsessed public schools.