Abhishek Chakraborty (left) along with other members of Advitiya Education Initiative in Dhanbad. (Gautam Dey)

Eight young professionals chose teaching needy children over plum pay packages and fat cat MNC jobs. And took up cricket bats and gilli danda as teaching aids instead of textbooks and copies.

Meet Dhanbad boy and De Nobili School Digwadih alumnus Abhishek Chakraborty (29), a chartered financial analyst, and his seven-member army of change-makers, who are teaching 200 children of government schools in five villages of Dhanbad district’s Nirsa block including Pandra, Shanpur, Poddardih, Khasnirsa and Baizan villages since the past month.

Instead of textbooks, they teach math through cricket or gilli danda scores, helping children to know and love numbers.

Their wisdom — knowing what makes underprivileged children want to study — comes from experience. Through the Whizmantra Educational Solutions that Abhishek founded a couple of years ago, he and his team have taught needy children in Delhi, Mumbai, Goa, Ahmedabad and Rajgir before reaching Dhanbad.

“I find it easy to teach children counting, addition and subtraction by asking them to count the number of runs scored during a cricket match,” smiles the young achiever with a difference.

He could have been counting the increasing number of zeroes in his pay cheque, but chose otherwise.

Abhishek had a lucrative job in Tata Consultancy Service, when he left it in 2009 to teach children.

“I’d always wanted to teach. In school, once I’d asked my teacher why tears stream out of our eyes. But instead of explaining why, my teacher slapped me hard and said ‘this is why tears come out’. This incident left an indelible mark on my mind,” he said. “That’s when I knew that children had to be taught by mentors who actually cared about their curiosity.”

A teammate, Sucharita Mukherjee (24), who’s the programme director of the Advitiya Education Initiative programme launched by the group in Nirsa, added that they used inexpensive, traditional and easy-to-get play gear such as gilli danda and spinning tops to teach poor children.

“Geometry becomes great fun with a spinning top that runs only in circles. So much more easy than drawing a circle on paper and explaining to children what it is,” said Sucharita, a BTech, who topped in Classes X and XII from De Nobili School, CMRI.

Another teammate, Prashant Pathak (24) said they had ambitious plans.

“We want to expand our activity to almost 500 government schools across the district in all blocks,” said the Btech, an IIT Roorkee alumnus.

“In the long run, we want to launch our own schools. Our focus areas will be education of tribals and minorities as well as adult literacy. We’ll concentrate on secondary education as dropout rates are high. We want to make teaching effective through activities,” Abhishek said.

He also added a warning rider. “We will recruit only those who have always wanted to teach and have passion for the field, rather than those who have failed in other so-called glamorous professions,” he smiled.

Can innovative teaching make a difference to children?

Tell ttkhand@abpmail.com