The candidates of Ashirwad Test Series at the centre. Picture by Amit Kumar

Binay Kumar Singh, a daily wager at Dumariya in Banka started weeping as soon as he heard that his son Anupam had got a job of an assistant loco pilot after passing the exam of the Railway Recruitment Board (RRB), Secunderabad, 2012.

Anupam credits his success to Ashirwad Test Series, a free coaching institute that helps poor students crack competitive exams. “After completing my graduation in 2012, I had planned to go to Delhi to work as a labourer and I had even purchased a ticket but my after friends told me about the centre, I came back from the Bhagalpur railway station,” he said.

The coaching centre was started in 1999-2000 by one Gopal Krishna Jha and his five or six friends preparing for competitive examinations. Since then, around 2,500 students have successfully cleared competitive examinations. Apart from Anupam, Ashish Kumar and Mukesh Kumar, both hailing from poor backgrounds, have also qualified for the posts of assistant loco pilots at the Chandigarh and Bhopal circles of RRB, respectively. Both had cleared the examination in 2012. Around 130 students of the centre have successfully cracked competitive exams in 2012.

The coaching centre consists of 15-20 persons who help these poor students. Jha said they break up into groups. While one group prepares questions from previous years’ papers, the other solves queries. Sometimes, passouts, too, come forward to help these underprivileged students. Jha calls this a knowledge-sharing process.

“Since there are no teachers or resource persons, we do our best to guide the students,” said Santosh Kumar Sharma, who had joined the centre for tuitions in 2003 and went on to become a sub-inspector of police in 2004. Sharma is presently posted as the station house officer of Adampur police station in Bhagalpur.