Until she was 15, Radhika Gupta was always at the top of her class, and bored of it.
She had studied, up to Class 5, at an English-medium state board school in Hoshiarpur, Punjab – a private school that her family could afford only because of the discounted fee that it offered Radhika and her two siblings. Her parents, migrants from rural Jharkhand, had never finished school, and earned a modest living as confectioners selling home-made Indian sweets to retailers. So when it came to homework or preparing for exams, Radhika had almost no help at home.
In Class 6, her academic performance earned her a seat at the Hoshiarpur district branch of Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV), one of 661 Navodaya schools run by the union ministry of education.
Established in 1986, JNVs are residential secondary schools located across the country to provide accelerated education to socially and economically disadvantaged students, particularly from rural India. Affiliated to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), they’re free of cost for students from scheduled castes and tribes, with a nominal fee of Rs 600 a month for others. JNVs are among the top-ranked CBSE schools in India, and getting into them is a matter of prestige for students and their families.
At JNV Hoshiarpur, from Class 6 to 10, Radhika studied with some of the brightest students in her district. But she didn’t realise how complacent she had become about excelling until she joined Class 11 last year, when a new school and new teachers completely turned her life around.
Radhika’s new school is a “Centre of Excellence” run within JNV Chandigarh by the non-profit organisation Avanti Fellows. It is one of six different Centres of Excellence (CoEs) that Avanti has set up in JNVs across India since 2020 to provide specialised coaching, free of cost, for engineering and medical college entrance exams to gifted students in Class 11 and 12. The CoEs are the most intensive of Avanti’s many programmes that aim to give academically gifted students from low-income backgrounds the opportunity to build careers in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) – paths to livelihoods that could help them lift their families out of poverty in a single generation.
To get admission into a CoE, Class 10 students interested in taking up science sit for an eligibility test at JNVs across the country. Radhika’s batch at the JNV Chandigarh CoE has 40 students from five north Indian states – Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Leh-Ladakh. They were all among the highest-achieving students in their own respective JNV schools, and in their midst, Radhika finally feels more stimulated.
“In my previous school, I didn’t have any competition, and competition is important to make you feel motivated,” said Radhika, a shy 16-year-old with a wide smile. “I wanted to study with people who are at my level. It is the only way to maximise your potential. And I am getting that here at the CoE.” This was a sentiment echoed by many of Radhika’s classmates, who find competing with equally gifted peers both challenging and rewarding. “Initially I struggled with my performance, but then I started doing much better than before,” Radhika said. “It is stressful, but good.”
Being an Avanti CoE student has also inspired her to set higher goals than she ever thought possible for herself: doing well enough in the engineering Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) to get into one of the top Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), either in Mumbai or Chennai. “My dream is to earn well for my family, so that we don’t have to worry about money again.”
Supporting giftedness
Avanti Fellows and the government’s JNV initiative have one thing in common – the belief that it is important to create educational opportunities and access for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Centres of Excellence accelerate this shared goal by specifically focusing on nurturing the talents of naturally gifted children who, because of the disadvantages they come from, would not otherwise get equal access to opportunity.
Researchers around the world agree that intellectually gifted individuals have an outsized influence and impact on society – they are the ones most likely to become eminent scientists and academicians, top-ranking executives, artists and leaders. We also know that gifted people cannot achieve their full potential without opportunities, support and nurturing from an early age. It would be a fallacy to assume that they can thrive regardless of their social, economic or psychological circumstances, just because they are talented. In a 2011 paper titled ‘Rethinking giftedness and gifted education’, authors Subotnik et al pointed out that “opportunities provided by society are crucial at every point in the talent development process,” because these opportunities provide a context for talent to be nurtured.
In India, there is a direct correlation between economic privilege and access to higher education institutions, whether or not the students are gifted. Research based on data from the National Sample Survey shows that in 2021-22, over 51.6% of youth (aged 18-23) from India’s highest income quintile were enrolled in higher education institutes, compared to just 8.1% from the lowest income quintile. The gap is just as wide when it comes to completion of higher education courses: 25% of youth from high-income backgrounds completed a post-secondary degree in 2021-22, as against just 1.9% from low-income backgrounds.
While affirmative action policies have helped to improve access to higher education for people from historically excluded groups, elite institutions and high-value academic topics like science and engineering are still overwhelmingly dominated by those with financial and social privilege. And it is these elite institutions that, more often than not, are the best avenues for honing academic giftedness.
This is the dual reason behind Avanti’s vision: creating a level-playing field for underprivileged children and elite institutions to access each other. “In the upper echelons of academia and industry, we need more equitable representation,” said Vandana Goyal, the co-chief executive officer of Avanti Fellows. “If you help really gifted children with a simple intervention of preparing for exams, they could change the fabric of some of these institutions over time.”
Avanti chose to create these interventions in the STEM fields because they often lead to high-paying careers, and because students from low-income backgrounds, and female students in particular, have always been underrepresented at the top-tier science and technology institutes.
STEM jobs make up 70% of the highest paying jobs worldwide, with starting salaries of around Rs 4 lakh per year. According to Avanti’s analysis of available government data, only 3.5% of students from low-income families qualify into STEM colleges in India, compared to 57% of high-income students. More than 80% of the students who qualify for admission into STEM institutes come from coaching classes that charge fees between Rs 1.5 and 2 lakh a year, which low-income families cannot afford.
Avanti’s programmes involve intensive coaching and mentoring to prepare students for two of India’s most competitive engineering and medical college exams, the JEE and NEET (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test) respectively. They’re run by a team of curriculum designers and 130 qualified teachers. Many of its programmes offer system-support to state government schools, which have helped serve more than 88,000 students in 2024-25 alone.
These programmes include after-school online classes that are free of cost, and thus accessible to students whose families cannot afford to pay for quality private coaching. The online coaching is particularly suited to gifted girls, whose families are less likely to allow them to travel for in-person evening or night-time classes. In the last three years, Avanti has seen an eightfold increase in the number of girls graduating from its programmes.
As a formal knowledge partner to the Navodaya schools, Avanti also runs two in-person coaching programmes: the Nodal programme, which involves in-person after-school classes for all science students in 16 JNVs, and the CoE programme, in which Avanti teachers directly conduct both school classes and after-school training for small batches of high-achieving students within the JNV system. Since Avanti’s founding, these physical tutoring programmes have helped more than 6,000 students graduate, with over 2,000 placing in the top 5% colleges after clearing their JEE-Mains and around 1,000 placing into the top 1% of STEM colleges.
In 2025, over 43% of Avanti’s 307 Nodal programme students passed the JEE-Main exams. Compare this with India’s overall pass percentage for the same exam: 14.7 lakh students appeared for the test, of which 17.6% cleared it.
The success of the CoE programme has been even more impressive: 709 students have graduated from CoEs across India so far, with 85% placing in the top 5% colleges. In 2025, 86.7% of Avanti’s 51 CoE students cleared the JEE, while 93.1% passed it last year. This has been a matter of pride for the JNV schools collaborating with Avanti.
“JEE and NEET are very difficult exams that most students cannot crack in the first attempt,” said Arvinder Singh Bhullar, the principal of JNV Chandigarh. “Most JEE and NEET aspirants from private coaching classes are droppers, appearing for the exam for the second or third time. But almost all CoE students tend to crack the exams in the first try itself.”
According to Avanti, low-income students from its programmes are 15 times more likely to qualify into STEM colleges compared to others in their income category. It also claims that 50% of its alumni find jobs after graduating, most of them bagging starting salaries that double their average household incomes of ₹4 lakh a year. Avanti has a track record of turning around the lives of even those students who do not make it to the top institutes.
Take 28-year-old Ela Shresth, who was part of Avanti’s second batch of students in 2014 and qualified for admission to the National Institute of Technology, Puducherry. “I couldn’t take up the seat in NIT because my family would not have been able to afford it, so I ended up doing my bachelor’s and master’s degree in maths from Delhi University,” said Shresth, whose father had a low-ranking government job in Bihar’s Sheikhpura district. With the help of modest scholarships, Shresth went on to get a post-graduate diploma in data science at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, and is now a data scientist at the Aditya Birla Group of Companies. in Mumbai. “I have been able to completely change my family’s financial situation.”
Centres of Excellence
Avanti started its regional CoEs in 2020 to be able to give more training time – up to 30 hours per week – to students who showed the maximum potential to succeed but lacked the necessary support for it. At the time, the concept of residential training institutes for entrance exam coaching was not new – Kota already had a thriving industry for students who could afford it, and Dakshana, a non-profit organisation, was running hostels for low-income students training for exams like JEE.
“Our main contribution has been to implement this model at a much larger scale,” said Akshay Saxena, co-CEO of Avanti. By tying up with existing residential Navodaya schools, Avanti was able to set up its CoEs without having to create the infrastructure of hostels.
In five years, the organisation has set up CoEs in Puducherry, Chandigarh, Barwani (Madhya Pradesh), Kokrajhar (Assam) and, most recently, in Kohima (Nagaland) and Cuttack (Odisha). Each centre serves the highest-achieving JNV students from all the states in each region, selected through a special eligibility exam.
The CoEs in Chandigarh and Kokrajhar were launched as all-girls centres, in keeping with Avanti’s goal to improve the representation of girls and women in STEM. “When I first joined Avanti, that was the main question on my mind – how do we enable more women to engage in the workforce?” said Vandana Goyal. “Girls are more likely to doubt themselves, more susceptible to pressure from family and society. So we made concerted efforts to increase the number of girls in our programmes and improve outcomes for them. The girls-only CoEs have been the most effective of these efforts, with the best outcomes.”
In 2024, when Radhika Gupta joined the Chandigarh CoE, Avanti opened up her batch of 40 to also include 13 boys, at the request of the JNV in which the centre operates.
JNV Chandigarh is a spacious campus with large playgrounds and corridors dotted with childrens’ art. Avanti’s CoE has two dedicated classrooms and four teachers – one each for physics, chemistry, biology and maths.
Shubham Jha, the biology teacher at the centre, used to be a private coach for NEET before he joined Avanti last year. “Private coaching allows you to have smaller batches and give individual attention to students who can afford it,” said Jha. “But small private centres don’t have the kind of resources that a proper school has – computers for each student, projectors and other equipment. Plus, in the CoE model, we are with the students for most of the day, and can structure our teaching and revisions according to their needs.”
Jha believes Avanti’s CoEs have two main advantages. “First, it is a great model for students from financially and socially weaker backgrounds, because they would not have the opportunity to get this kind of education anywhere else,” he said. “It is also a place for academically gifted students to compete with their own peers. They may get overwhelmed by the competition at times, but we are constantly monitoring their growth and we motivate them when they need it.”
Avanti’s CEOs say that teachers like Jha are perhaps the biggest asset of the CoEs. “In the private coaching system, teachers have more of a transactional relationship with their students. But we have been able to hire teachers who really care,” said Saxena. “Many of our teachers are young, hired soon after college and placed in rural centres. The majority of them are from similar backgrounds as the students, so they understand them.”
For students, many of whom come from remote rural areas, studying in the CoE has expanded their horizons and made them more confident about achieving big dreams. And for most students, these dreams involve not just uplifting their families, but also giving back to society.
Seventeen-year-old Padma Chosol, for instance, is preparing for the NEET exam and has her heart set on getting into the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS, Delhi) and becoming a neurologist. Growing up on the outskirts of Leh, Padma was used to shouldering domestic responsibilities while her father worked a modest government job in remote parts of Ladakh. “My mother would fall sick very often, and I would feel helpless, because the medical facilities in my region are not very good,” said Padma. “That’s what inspired me to be a doctor – so that I can go back to Ladakh and work for the people there.”
Zeeshan Jafri, the son of daily-wage workers in Kargil, also came to the Chandigarh CoE with the dream of becoming the first doctor in his family. “Getting into a JNV is a very big deal for those who cannot afford such education, and getting into a CoE is even bigger,” said Zeeshan, who aims to get into cardiology. He took his inspiration from social media – specifically the Instagram videos of a cardiologist from Bangalore who provides free treatment to low-income patients. “I also want to give people affordable healthcare, like him.”
While JNVs and CoEs have given them free education up to Class 12, many of the students are aware they will need scholarships to afford even the subsidised fees of government-aided medical and engineering colleges. Avanti helps its students access some of these scholarships.
“Whatever it takes, I will work hard and finish my education, so that I can earn for my family,” said Muskan, a 16-year-old from Hoshiarpur who prefers to go by her first name. The daughter of a plumber and a beautician, Muskan plans to take up computer science after clearing her JEE. Eventually, she hopes to establish her own tech-based startup. “My mother set up her own parlour at home after fighting a lot of narrow-mindedness in the village about what women should do or not do,” she said. “She has worked very hard, and I want to earn to be able to give her some rest.”
All photos by Aarefa Johari
Tags
- Avanti Fellows,
- Giftedness,
- Empowering Communities,
- Education
