For the first few years, the world laughed. “How can a man with a broken blackboard compete with the corporate giants of Kota?” Then the results came.
Every year, over one million students compete for just 10,000 seats in the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). It is arguably the toughest undergraduate entrance exam in the world. In this pressure cooker of ambition, coaching centers charge parents a fortune—often upwards of $5,000 a year—for a shot at the dream. Super 30
Stories of their alumni are the stuff of legend: For the first few years, the world laughed
The program famously operates on a shoestring budget. Instead of expensive projectors, they use blackboards and clay models. Anand Kumar is known for simplifying complex calculus and physics problems using real-life examples from the streets of Bihar—relating a parabola to the arc of a tossed stone, or thermodynamics to the pressure in a pressure cooker. It is arguably the toughest undergraduate entrance exam