They are the leaders of the national school board of India for more than 20 years. So it’s no wonder you’re a cancer doctor in New York; another is a doctoral fellow at MIT; one is a Harvard professor; one, a hedge fund manager in Singapore, and up to 11 work for Google.
Each is a story of individual talent and effort, excellence and achievement, all outliers. But taken together, as an investigation by The Indian Express reveals, the arcs of their different lives, and careers, tell significant stories of a generation that came of age after the opening of India in the 1990s. how some aspirations endure, others do not; how some divisions have collapsed, some remain as intractable as ever.
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More than half of the former live abroad today, the United States being the chosen destination. Most are in science and technology and IITs are their most favored undergraduate pit stop; More than half of them grew up outside of metropolitan areas, in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and only one is a minority: there are no Dalits or Tribals. And if you are a topper as a girl, you are much less likely to move abroad than if you were a boy.
These are some of the key findings from the four-month investigation by The Indian Express that tracked 86 men and women who ranked India first, between 1996 and 2015, on their Class 10 and 12 exams conducted by the Central Board. of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations.
Amid rising cut-off scores based on the Class 12 Board exams, as the government, in tune with its new National Education Policy, establishes a panel to explore a national test to modify the admission process to the university, the research findings are indicative of the challenges ahead.
More than half of the former live or work abroad.
More than half of the former, between 21 and 42 years old, are in foreign countries, most are employed, a quarter are pursuing higher education. Three out of four who are abroad are in the United States. While the United States remains the preferred destination, others are in the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, China, Canada, Bangladesh, and the United Arab Emirates.
Of those employed abroad, the majority work in the technology sector, followed by medicine and finance.
Four out of 10 who work in the US are in Silicon Valley. Like Biswanath Panda, who graduated from Little Flower School in Jamshedpur in 1999 and is now senior director of engineering at Google in San Francisco. In fact, Google is home to 11 toppers, the most of any company.
Karuna Ganesh, 37, left the country shortly after passing her ICSE Class 10 exam in 1999 to join the United World College (UWC), USA, an international boarding school that brings together 200 students from 80 countries. She is now a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
“My parents supported me in my move abroad, as UWC has a strong track record of sending students to the best universities around the world, in addition to the global and multicultural education it offers,” said Ganesh, who subsequently earned a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry, MA. in Medicine, PhD in Molecular Biology and MD from Cambridge University.
Most went abroad to study citing a better ecosystem
Higher education is the main reason the toppers left the country. Of those living abroad, more than 70% left India for undergraduate or graduate studies; only a dozen of the 86 went looking for a job.
For example, Somnath Bose, 40, left India in 2008 with an MBBS from Calcutta Medical College and an MD from AIIMS, to further his intensive care training. Currently, he is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston and a staff anesthesiologist at its teaching hospital, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Bose says that when he left India, intensive care programs were just beginning to open up. “The United States … had well-established clinical training pathways in that field, as well as providing opportunities to combine clinical work with a focus on research,” he said.
28-year-old Janaki Sheth, who attended a school in Thane and passed the ICSE class 10 exams in 2008 with 98.6%, has a BS degree in physical engineering from IIT Bombay. In 2014, he went to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. On why she decided to study abroad, Sheth, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, said: “Six or seven years ago, scientific research was not very well funded in India. So even though I had some invaluable experiences at IIT, it wasn’t enough for a PhD. In the United States, science gets a big political boost, which means there are more places to do good work and there is a constant update of technology, ”he said.
For Arkya Chatterjee, 24, who led the ISC Class 12 exam in 2015 from a Kolkata school before graduating from IIT-Bombay in Engineering Physics, the move to the US revealed a different side of the teacher equation- student. “(There is) more honesty about collaborations: teachers encourage students to talk to each other and work together on homework. This reduces the incentive for academic dishonesty. This kind of trust was mostly lacking in my undergraduate institute in India, ”said Chatterjee, who is now enrolled as a PhD student at MIT.
More than half of the former (48 of 86) chose engineering as their undergraduate degree; only 12 did medicine. Among those who studied engineering, six out of 10 did so at an IIT.
Many, however, confessed that an interest in engineering was not always the motivation behind the decision.
Sundaresh Nageswaran, 32, who passed the CBSE Class 10 exam in 2004 before studying Mechanical Engineering at IIT-Roorkee, said it was the “social norm” for those who did well in school to study engineering. “Engineering, or more specifically IIT, was the rule … Later I realized that I was not interested in engineering and I moved to other fields,” he said.
Sundresh later earned an MBA from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, and until September was General Manager (Business Development) at Sea6 Energy, a platform that harnesses the potential of the oceans. In his position there, he admits, there was no direct use for his mechanical engineering knowledge. You are now working in your own company.
To be sure, few regret earning a college degree in engineering. However, many wish they had been exposed to other professions or career counseling at that age.
Lekshmi Vaidyeswaran, 29, who passed the CBSE Class 10 exam in 2007 with 99%, and is currently Senior Product Manager at ICICI Prudential Life Insurance in Mumbai, has a BTech degree in Applied Electronics and Instrumentation from the College of Trivandrum Engineering.
“My family wanted me to choose Commerce. I insisted on engineering, since any other option was perceived as something chosen by those who could not reach engineering ”, he said. “In retrospect, yes, I would have opted for Commerce and would have pursued a Public Accounting career.”
Subhojit Ghosh, 29, who passed a Kolkata school’s ISC Class 12 exam in 2009 with 99.25%, has a BTech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur.
He subsequently completed an MBA from Harvard Business School and works as a Senior Product Manager at Amazon in Seattle. “While the IIT brand was definitely a factor, there was no family pressure … I liked math and science, and I agree I didn’t know much about other non-IIT options at the time, probably due to the lack of career advice at a school level. But in hindsight, a better awareness of how your college degree ties into various types of future professional roles may have altered my decision to choose mechanical engineering, ”he said.
Those who stayed in India
Among the toppers who stayed or returned to India after higher education, the majority chose a career in finance, followed by the technology, consulting and business sector. This is different from those who settled abroad, who mainly worked in the technology sector.
For 27-year-old Parnil Singh, the best CBSE Class 10 score of 2009 from a school in Visakhapatnam, there was little incentive to pursue graduate studies in management abroad, as he says the best business schools in India offered better value for money. While at IIM-Calcutta, where she did her MBA, Kearney, a global management consulting firm, offered Singh a job, and this month she joined them in Delhi as a consultant. “While an MBA abroad has its merits, it is too expensive. And today India has a lot of great jobs and opportunities in the private sector, ”he said.
Address social and economic challenges
Of the top 86, only one belonged to the Other Backward Class (OBC) category. None were Dalits or tribal. Of the 76 toppers who responded to this newspaper’s questionnaire, only five were first-generation college students.
Mohammad Ismat, 29, from Imphal, Manipur, led the Class 12 CBSE exam in 2012. Ismat, who says his teacher SM Singh paid the Board exam fee as his family couldn’t afford it, went on to study BSc (Honors) Physics at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, funded by a corporate house.
A personal crisis at home meant Ismat had to put off his career aspirations for nearly four years after graduating from the University of Delhi. This year, he began preparing for the UPSC exam. Of the top 74 who shared their household income with The Indian Express, only one came from the lowest income quartile. The student, who did not want to be named, said his parents were earning less than 1 lakh rupees per year when he passed the Class Board exam 12.
Almost three-quarters said that their parents were earning more than Rs 5 lakh annually at the time of their Board examinations. The remainder reported annual household income of between Rs 1 lakh and Rs 5 lakh.
More than half of the former are from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities such as Dehradun, Dhanbad, Asansol, Jamshedpur, Trivandrum, Lucknow and Meerut, cities where ICSE and CBSE English language schools have ridden on ambition and aspiration of a better future in these parts. These are also the cities hardest hit during the pandemic, compounding fears of job loss and school dropouts.
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