100 youngsters give up hot jobs TO TEACH FOR INDIA

100 youngsters give up hot jobs TO TEACH FOR INDIA
Namita Devidayal


When 23-year-old Saurabh Taneja announced to his parents that he wanted to take two years off and teach underprivileged children, they were aghast. Their son had graduated from IIT (Delhi) and had a well-paying job as a consultant with a Bangalore-based company.

They had some very big questions for him: Why would you want to throw it all away? Why would you take such an enormous salary cut? Who had heard of Teach For India? What about the future? Saurabh realized that these were not issues he could discuss over the phone. He flew home to Jaipur, sat them down, and explained why he wanted to leave his comfort zone and enter a world where he may not even have fans above his head, or why he was willing to go from earning Rs 50,000 to Rs 15,000 per month. “I had to explain to them that this may be the most challenging thing I would do in my entire life,” he says.

Over the last couple of months, many 20-somethings have been similarly convincing their parents about their decision to mentor children. Says Gaurav Singh, 24, a software programmer with Accenture, "My mother was also understandably apprehensive about my decision to quit the corporate world and become a teacher. But when I told her in detail about the idea and the people behind Teach For India and also why I wanted to be a part of it she not only supported me but was also very proud of my decision.” It may have taken a little heartburn, but Saurabh and Gaurav are now on board.

Starting June this year, 100 such youngsters from different walks of life will be spread across in a unique national programme that seeks to narrow the educational gap in India by placing accomplished graduates and young professionals in low-income schools to teach for two years. The Teach For India fellows will undergo rigorous training in May and enter the classrooms after the summer vacation. This year, the programme is confined to 45 low-income private schools and municipal schools in Mumbai and Pune,.

Over a period of time, it will spread across the country. Teach For India founder Shaheen Mistri says, “Our Fellows represent the driving force of Teach For India’s movement. The energy, quality, commitment and passion of our candidates has been the most inspiring. It drives us to work relentlessly to ensure that Teach For India’s first class of 2009 is a success.” When asked what motivated them to apply for this fellowship, the youngsters are driven by a range of reasons—from an altruistic desire to give back to a very practical sense that they were, in fact, going to enhance their future. For, they realize that such an experience will broaden their leadership and management skills and add value to whatever they end up doing. This is perhaps why a number of companies – including the Aditya Birla group, Thermax, ICICI – are supporting the programme, agreeing to pay the stipends for, as well as reinstate, any employee who qualifies and takes the two years off to teach. For some, the two-year stint also promises to be an extraordinary, if challenging, adventure. “It is a crash course in how to manage challenges,” says Dhiren Achtani, 26, who currently works as a project manager for Citibank, “I am driven by that idea of slowly and steadily reaching that last mile where your students show signs of progress --progress that tells you that you added value and you made the child move from bookish knowledge to real knowledge and that you earned that bit of the day…”