Anand Kumar

He always cherished a dream to study in Cambridge but finances stopped him. Now, his Super 30 initiative has made space for Anand Kumar to deliver lectures at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University in US.

Anand’s recognition in pioneering Super 30 has caught the attention of global media for successfully mentoring students from underprivileged sections for India’s premier institutions such as the IITs.

At a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in US, vowing to make India proud, another son of the soil, Anand, in a rare honour, has received invitations from the world’s top two universities to deliver lectures.

On September 30, when Modi would have a formal summit meeting with US President Barack Obama at the White House, 600km from Washington, Super 30 founder and mathematician Anand will speak at MIT Media Lab, an inter-disciplinary research laboratory. The next day, Anand will speak at the International Education Policy programme of Harvard University. The programme promotes global social justice through their unparalleled and effective leadership of innovative and sustainable education reforms worldwide. At both the universities, he will speak on the success of Super 30 beginning from its nascent stage and how underprivileged students coming from the economically weaker sections of society have benefited.

“I will talk on how the world can be a better place using inclusive education as a powerful tool to usher in psychological and societal change. What I have done in the past 14 years in the backwaters of my home state Bihar is a small initiative to provide the right opportunity to a bunch of talented and passionate students from the underprivileged sections. But the results have been astonishing. It needs to be replicated on a larger scale, as education alone has the power to tackle the world’s problems,” he said.

On Monday, Anand met eminent mathematician Manjul Bhargava, the winner of Field Medal 2014 — the biggest prize in the field of mathematics, which is also called the mathematics’ Nobel.