Every year students in India vie for places at the nation’s premier science universities. The colleges are known collectively as the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs. Across the country, hundreds of thousands students take the entrance exam. But only a tiny handful — about the top two percent — are accepted.

One math tutor, Anand Kumar, has had amazing success getting his students in, despite the fact that many come from extreme poverty. In this report, I visit the Ramanujan School of Mathematics in Patna, Bihar, in north-central India, and tell this teacher’s extraordinary story.

The radio story originally aired on the World Vision Report
in January 2010.