Bihar’s Super 30: Hard lessons

Getting into the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) is even harder than Harvard or Oxbridge: about 60 hopefuls apply for each place. And you can see why; it produces more millionaires than any other educational institution.

But this film isn’t the story of IIT; it’s about the vision of two remarkable men who set up a school called the Ramanujan School of Mathematics in India’s poorest state, Bihar. The two men are Anand Kumar, a brilliant mathematician, and Abhayanand, a senior police officer. These unlikely visionaries share the belief that poverty, caste and religion should be no barrier to opportunity.

Ten years ago Al Jazeera travelled to Bihar to follow the class of 2007, from their initial selection out of over 3000 hopefuls through to the moment when the chosen Super 30 got their final results, which would enable the students to go on to IIT and the potential of a top-flight career in information technology.

Now, 10 years on, we revisit the Super 30 series and return to Bihar to discover what has become of this innovative project and the successful students from the class of 2007.

In this second episode, Hard Lessons, we meet Abhayanand, Deputy Chief of Police for the state of Bihar. He spends his free time teaching physics to the Super 30.

We also meet some of Abhayanand’s star pupils – students like Pranav Prince, perhaps the brightest of the bunch, and Shyam Ratan, a Super 30 student still struggling to recover from the murder of his father just two years previously.