IIT Alumnus who became teacher

Meet Arvind Gupta: The IIT Kanpur Engineer Who Quit His Job At Telco And Began Teaching Science To The Children Of India

When Arvind Gupta quit his job, his mother came to his defence stating ‘good, now he will do something noble with his life’. A prophetic statement from a woman who never had a day of formal education in her life but ensured that her four children excelled academically.

For almost 30 years now, Arvind Gupta has been taking his love for science and learning to the young minds of your country. Gupta has travelled to over 3000 schools, demonstrating captivating science experiments to wide eyed children. What sparks their imagination further is that Gupta uses only everyday garbage as the building blocks of these experiments.

“All teaching aids we use are hand-made. It‘s important for children to see that you don‘t need fancy materials. Science can also help you look critically at materials that are often considered trash, there is a lot of learning in that itself”

An empowering lesson for his pupils who are of limited means. They watch him as he explains phenomenon like light and its laws of convergence & divergence with only used up ball-point pen refills, rubber slippers or empty tetra packs! He also distributes CD’s packed with massive collections of e-books and videos to the schools he visits. Often, these are the only teaching aids they have ever received or used. The keenest minds of our country might be hidden away in a broken down municipality school, in a town we have never heard of. A tryst with Arvind Gupta could open their eyes to endless possibilities and give them the chance to dream, despite their limiting environment.

Gupta’s dedication, perseverance and brilliance have not gone unnoticed. He has been recognized by organisations such as UNESCO, UNICEF, International Toy Research Association, Boston Science Centre, Walt Disney Imagineering and Research.

He has received a special award given by the National Association for the Blind for designing teaching aids for pre-school blind children and the Ruchi Ram Sahni Award for science popularization, among others.

“I have an enduring passion for my work because it allows me to reinvent myself. Every child has a dream in their eyes, and each of them instills a hope in me about the future”, he shares.

Thus, not every day do we come across good Samaritans like Gupta who would give their all for the betterment of the society!