BREAKING BARRIERS:Sarath Babu with his mother outside their house in Chennai’s Madipakkam slum where he continues to stay.Babu, an IIM alumnus, runs a catering business

Sarath Babu might not have topped school had there been electricity in his house. “I studied in the light of a kerosene lamp. The lamp illuminated only my books, while the rest of the room was dark. I had no choice but to concentrate on my books,” laughs 29-year-old Sarath, who lived in a thatched hut in Chennai’s Madipakkam slum. His mother sold idlis to support a family of six.

But there were other distractions in Sarath’s life. Every morning he went from door to door in his slum colony, selling idlis. Fights at the three liquor shops near his house were a regular evening ritual. And every Diwali, he agonised over how he would face his class fellows. “They would be wearing new clothes to school. I hadn’t worn a new shirt in years,” recalls Sarath.

But ultimately the clothes didn’t matter. Sarath topped his school in Class XII, got an engineering degree from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani — the fees was paid by pawning his sister’s jewellery — and studied management at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad. He now runs a catering business in Chennai. Last year, Sarath’s firm, FoodKing Catering Services Pvt Ltd, posted a turnover of Rs 9 crore. The slum boy aspires to run a food catering empire some day.

You could call Sarath a modern-day Dhirubhai Ambani. But Sarath is not alone. A growing number of youth from low income families is breaking the glass ceiling of good education and social pedigree and carving out high flying careers for themselves.

Last month, the son of an illiterate lorry driver from a village in Andhra Pradesh joined Google, Bangalore, after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai. A pani-puri vendor in Vishakhapatnam saved Rs 60,000 to help his wife study engineering. She now works at Infosys.

It’s not just a growing corporate sector that is creating new work opportunities for the economically underprivileged. Two sons of a Vadodara-based muezzin, Irfan and Yusuf Pathan, broke into the cut-throat world of Indian cricket and have become players to reckon with. And S.S.P. Chowrasia, a gardener’s son at Calcutta’s Royal Calcutta Golf Club, proved that golf is no longer a rich man’s preserve when he won Indian Masters early this year.

Harendra Gupta is another golfer who has soared from rags to riches. His father, who is a farmer in Gorakhpur, saw a golf club for the first time when his son won the Hero Golf tournament in 2005. “Now he can follow the game well,” says Gupta, a Class V dropout who learned golf by watching golfers at the Chandigarh Golf Club, where he worked as a caddie. After winning three tournaments since he turned pro in 2004, Gupta is richer by Rs 50 lakh.

That’s not all. House painter Ravinder Ravi from Ludhiana metamorphosed into a star singer after entering the reality show Indian Idol in 2004. And former domestic help Baby Haldar, a primary school dropout, has proved that a creative streak has nothing to do with conventional education. Her book, A Life Less Ordinary, published in 2006, has sold 7,000 copies and 13 foreign rights to it were acquired.

Were it not for a publishing boom in India, Baby Haldar could not have become a success, says sociologist Ramachandra Guha. “An expanding economy is throwing up new work and creative opportunities and slowly dissolving social disparities,” he says.

Affluence and modernity is no longer an exclusive club, agrees social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan. “Everyone feels they can get into it,” he says. Also, a rapidly developing economy like India needs to be inclusive to grow, he adds.

For Pitambar Kumar’s farmer father a degree in ocean engineering and naval architecture meant only one thing — a ticket to prosperity for his son. Kumar grew up in Harpatti village in Bihar’s Purnea district, walked four kilometers to school and studied in the light of a kerosene lamp. When he moved to Purnea for higher studies, he carried bags of rice, pulses and other supplies from home, as he couldn’t afford to buy them in town.

The social and economic conditions in Bihar’s villages have deteriorated drastically, says 23-year-old Kumar. “Living conditions in the villages are tough and earnings are low. Most farmers in my village want their children to get out and make a new life,” he says. Kumar did just that. He took tuition at Patna’s Super 30 Coaching Institute and got admission into IIT, Kharagpur two years ago.

Super 30 was set up in 2003 to help poor students — both academically and financially — to crack the IIT joint entrance exam. Since then its popularity has soared. “About 1,000 poor students sit for our entrance test every year. We select the top 30,” says Anand Kumar, who runs Super 30. About 150 students have studied at the institute so far, out of which 134 have cleared the IIT exam.

There’s a child of a brick kiln labourer, a vegetable vendor, an auto rickshaw driver and a street-side tea shop owner studying at the coaching institute. “They all slog. They study for 16 to 18 hours a day, every day of the year. We take an IIT-like test every third day,” says tutor Kumar.

Indeed, the IIT fever has penetrated deep into the backwaters of Bihar. A voluntary organisation, I-Desire, started by three IIT alumni, helps poor students in Bhagalpur and Patna to crack the JEE. “We mentor and organise free-of-cost coaching for 40 poor students every year,” says Chicago-based Sushil Singhania, a founder member. This year, 18 students selected by I-Desire cleared the IIT exam.

Singhania — who grew up in Bhagalpur — feels that growing awareness has propelled social change in small town India. “When I was growing up, I knew nothing about the world outside my town,” he remembers. But today, the boys of Bhagalpur are global citizens. “The Internet and the media have changed the town’s mindset. The youth are aware and ambitious,” says Singhania.

MISSION POSSIBLE: (from top) Baby Haldar, a former domestic help, who shot into the limelight after she wrote a book; golf champ S.S.P. Chowrasia; a class in progress at Patna’s Super 30 Coaching Institute

K. Jagannath will agree with that. The president of the Bellandur village gram panchayat, on the outskirts of Bangalore, says ‘computer’ has become the buzzword in his village. “The villagers want their children to learn computers. They believe it’s the ticket to a good life,” says Jagannath.

That is probably why the numbers of students coming to engineering colleges from low income families is on the rise. This year, 25 poor students were admitted to Bangalore’s Visveswaraya Institute of Technology (VIT). “Even five years ago, just three or four such students joined the institute every year,” says principal R.H. Nagabhushan. “The opening of the Indian economy and easy access to bank loans have made education accessible,” he adds.

With the rising demand for skilled manpower, education is becoming a booming business even in small towns. Take the case of Coimbatore. The Tamil Nadu town is rapidly growing as an industrial and automobile hub. “There is a huge demand for technically trained manpower in Coimbatore. So educational institutes are sprouting to meet this demand,” says Bala Murugan, principal, GKD Institute of Technological Resources (GKDITR), Coimbatore. There are about 150 industrial training institutes in the city, and almost all have a quota and monetary incentives for poor students, adds Murugan.

GKDITR trains 4,000 students in industrial design and automation every year. Of these, 75 per cent are from economically deprived families. “Our institute has 100 per cent placement. Companies like Siemens, Larsen & Toubro, Voltas and TVS regularly hire our students,” claims Murugan.

But education is not the only route being used to climb the ladder. Class IV dropout Maltiben Choudhary is a regular guest speaker at IIM, Ahmedabad. She is invited to talk about how she grew her dairy business — from owning one famished buffalo calf to earning Rs 1.25 lakh a month. Choudhary lives in Gujarat’s Mehsana district and when the dairy revolution swept the state, she milked money from it. “I was married off at 15. My husband was a farm hand. We had no money and I knew I had to do some work,” says Choudhary, 62. In 1971, she bought a buffalo calf for Rs 80 and became part of the Mehsana Milk Cooperative. Today, she owns 25 buffalos and supplies 300 litres of milk to the cooperative daily. “Hundreds of women joined the cooperative after seeing me make money,” says Choudhary.

Like Choudhary, Baby Haldar also studied for only a few years. She had never aspired to write a book — it just happened. “One day, my employer gave me a notebook and pen and asked me to pen my thoughts,” says Haldar, who grew up in Murshidabad. She was abandoned by her mother when she was seven, married off at 12, and worked as a domestic help in Gurgaon.

But that’s all in the past. After she became a writer, Haldar is invited to literary festivals and has even shared a dais with Salman Rushdie. “The publishing market is opening up and all kinds of new writing is being promoted,” says Preeti Gill, editor, Zubaan, publisher of A Life Less Ordinary.

Baby, Sharath and others like them have made sure that despite the disadvantages they started out with, their lives are ordinary no more.