Like a proud father, Dr Achyuta Samanta describes a welcome dinner for his Indian aboriginal students after they amazed many by winning the 2007 Under-14 International School Rugby Championship in Britain. 'In 10 days over there, they had not just beaten the world. They had also learned to eat with forks and knives without making a sound on their plates,' recounts Samanta. 'That's what children can do when given an opportunity.'
Opportunity is the key word at Samanta's Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, an enormous free school for marginalised indigenous children in India. With 15,000 students, the residential institute in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, is about to get a whole lot bigger. For the tenacious Samanta, a kind of guru/Horatio Alger, no goal seems unattainable.
Samanta recently announced that he would open 20 smaller branches of his institute in remote tribal areas. He aims to educate 200,000 children from indigenous tribes before the end of this decade.
'Everything is possible with enthusiasm and willpower,' says Samanta, a former chemistry teacher, who was raised in poverty himself. 'And I am happiest working with the poorest of the poor.'
Government schools in aboriginal areas of Orissa, a poor coastal state where 25 per cent of the populace come from 68 tribes, are plagued with dropout rates of up to 80 per cent as a result of child marriage and labour practices. Some children are lured from their studies by the Naxalite movement, in which Maoist armies swell their ranks by attracting the most desperate. And people here are that: government experts acknowledge that only five out of 50 tribal villages even have electricity.
Yet students don't seem to drop out of Kalinga. Everyone completes their studies, and a small portion go on to Samanta's larger, money-making Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology. The private university's impressive campus covers the southern end of Bhubaneswar.