Stepping out from his policing routine, 2013-batch IPS officer Y. Raghuvanshi has taken to mentoring underprivileged students for better and brighter career prospects. The SP of North Bengal’s Alipurduar district has started free online coaching for meritorious students of the district to help them crack exams like JEE and UPSC. He has started these online classes with the help of few IIT scholars, NGOs, and friends. He also provides the students with mobile phones and internet connectivity to enable them to attend the classes.
ONLINE COACHING FOR UNDERPRIVILEGED KIDS
Alipurduar, which has a population of different tribal communities, is known for its tea gardens. Here, majority of the people are dependent on the employment generated from the tea estates.
When Mr. Raghuvanshi got posted as SP here, he thought of helping the youth of the area by providing free-of-cost online coaching and roped in some IITians and civil servants to take the classes.
Speaking about it, he told media, “As a society, we will only progress when we provide an opportunity to everybody in an egalitarian way. There are talented students in remote areas who are not even aware of how to prepare for these exams. My friends from IIT have enabled us in providing such an opportunity to these kids by teaching them online.”
PROVIDING MOBILE AND INTERNET
He further said that providing online classes to these students was a big challenge for him as most of them didn’t have mobile phones with them. Even their parents were unaware about UPSC and IIT and wasn’t much fascinated by the idea of such coaching.
To overcome these hurdles, Mr. Raghuvanshi provided mobile phones to these underprivileged kids. Those who had network issues were told to come to the local police station to get proper network connection.
The IPS officer himself reached out to the parents and made them understand about the necessity of this extensive training so that the children can freely join the online sessions and get to know of the options before them.
EXAM FOR ENROLLMENT
Mr. Raghuvanshi laid considerable emphasis on selection of meritorious students. Therefore, to enroll the students in this online coaching, he took the help of Alipurduar’s local teachers’ organisation called Manobik Mukh to take exam in almost all the schools of the district. Based on the results, around 50 students were selected from class 12 for the online coaching.
The students who got selected for the online coaching are now taught physics for 1.5 hours thrice a week. They learn chemistry five days a week, with each class being of one hour duration. Simultaneously, other subjects are taught, followed by a weekly test which is conducted to check how the students are performing.
Earlier, the online classes were limited only for class 12 students, but now, they have been extended to class 11 students as well and around 150 students have been selected through the same examination procedure for a two-year course.
