Anand Kumar

For a person with modest background to devote his life to uplift of the talented students from the underprivileged sections of the society through education and helping them reach India’s premiere IITs, it is quite natural to draw eyeballs. But it also brought endless miseries for the man, as he had to face attacks from mafiosi and baseless and demotivating criticism to stop him from going ahead.
But Anand Kumar, took everything in his stride and braved the struggle to continue on his path to help students from the poor strata crack the IIT-JEE year after year through his pioneering initiative called Super 30. His work has been recognised both in India and abroad, as he has a vocal become ambassador of India’s soft power in countries like Japan, Canada and USA. His Super 30 initiative provided the right plot for a Bollywood film on his life, while his style of teaching to make mathematics interesting for students made him immensely popular. He was also invited to Amitabh Bachchan’s KBC show. The film was declared tax free in eight Indian states. A book on his life by Penguin also became a best seller .
But all this has not been easy. Having missed the opportunity to study in the prestigious Cambridge University due to poverty that struck his family after the sudden demise of his father and faced opposition from the high and mighty, he decided to work for the students like him, which resulted in the birth of ‘Super 30’, a free-of-cost residential programme for 30 students. His entire family helped him in it to bring down the cost of managing everything for 30 students. With his unwavering devotion and passion, Super 30 soon made a mark, as it’s success rate kept improving each year to usher in a silent revolution. The students for whom poverty was a big handicap witnessed a generational shift to script inspiring stories. It was poetic justice with him that in 2019 he went the Cambridge University on the invitation of the prestigious Cambridge Union, world’s oldest debating and free speech society at the University of Cambridge, to deliver a lecture. He was also invited by famed institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, University of British Columbia and Tokyo University to share his inspiring journey and Super 30 student’s story, which also drew appreciation from former US president Barack Obama’s envoy MR Rashad Hussain. Famed news magazines like Newsweek, Time, New York Times, Monocle etc. and. channels like Discovery, BBC, Japanese TV , French TV also carried features on him.