WASHINGTON: Anand Kumar, the founder of Super 30 and a renowned mathematician, has announced his plans to introduce a novel online educational platform aimed at extending learning opportunities to India’s impoverished and underprivileged students.
Speaking at the 2024 Kellogg India Business Conference, themed “Reimagining India: Shaping the Global Economic Landscape,” hosted by the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Kumar emphasized the necessity of leveraging existing technology to broaden access to education for a greater number of students.
“Time has come to embrace the available technology to reach out to more and more students.
Super 30 made me growing aspirations of the poor to change their lives and many of the students who passed out did bright about a generational shift due to the power of education. A new online educational platform will be launched soon to take education to the doorsteps of the poor in what would be an expanded version of his pioneering Super 30 initiative,” Kumar said.
Maintaining that the disruption caused by the life-changing COVID pandemic taught him a lot, as connected with students stuck in home through social media to engage with them, Kumar said one could learn a lot from adversities.
“The world is full of talented people. Even in the present scenario, there are so many children hidden from the eyes of the world due to poverty. They have ability to become Newton and Ramanujan but perhaps their talent gets lost due to a lack of opportunity. My online initiative is aimed at giving them the platform to excel,” he added.
Kumar said it would fulfil that has been his dream to see every underprivileged student educated.
“The poorest also deserve quality education.
Time has come to move out of the labs to get a feel of poverty in nations and villages, where people don’t even get electricity, clean water and proper food. Now the time has come and technology is also there to connect with the poor irrespective of region,” he said.
According to Kumar the best use of technology would be to ensure that opportunities must reach the have-nots, he said this was the responsibility of the society to make it happen to increase the talent pool for the prosperity of the world and benefit of humanity at large.
“I am not a big personality, just an ordinary teacher but today, I am telling you from the core of my heart on the basis of my feelings, and my experiences if you have keen desire for certain goal and you continue hard work, you will achieve it. It is possible that it will take a longer time. More time than you thought. But success will come definitely,” Kumar said.