President Ram Nath Kovind recently felicitated students from underprivileged sections of the society who cleared the IIT JEE Advance 2018 exam after intensive coaching under GAIl (India) limited’s Corporate Social Responsibility initiative ‘GAIl Utkarsh’.
The felicitation programme was held at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campus in the Capital. Also present on the occasion were GAIl officiating chairman and managing director Dr Ashutosh Karnatak, and Center for Social Responsibility and leadership (CSRl) director SK Shahi.
The students, who are from the ninth batch of GAIl Utkarsh, were provided one-year of free residential coaching under this CSR project. GAIl was the first PSU to start the coaching centre at Kanpur for talented but underprivileged students in 2009-10.
Conducted in partnership with CSRl, GAIl Utkarsh started with just 23 students, which expanded to 100 students from 2011-12. Since its inception, 679 students were enrolled in the initiative, out of which 591 secured admission in IITs/NITs and other reputed engineering colleges. The success rate of the project is 87 per cent. This year, 99 out of 100 students qualified in JEE Main, out of which 52 students qualified in IIT JEE Advance, including six girls.
The students are selected for this initiative on the basis of written test, interview and strict economic criteria. Most of them come from the rural background and their parents have small sources of income. They can’t afford to pay costly fees of private institutes. So far, more than 150 students have got job placements in reputed companies.