My story
From a government school in Delhi to a doctorate in education: why I build free learning for children who cannot afford it.
Chapter 1
In 1995 I passed Class XII from a government school in Delhi with one dream, which I had carried since childhood: to become an engineer. I could not have told you why. I came from a lower-middle-class family. My parents were not well educated, and nobody around us could explain what it would mean for a child to become an engineer instead of finishing an ordinary degree and taking a small job.
Between 1992 and 1995 my days were hard. I studied until 3 a.m. and woke at 5 to catch a bus, after walking 1.5 km to the stop. If I missed the 5:40 bus I walked another 3–4 km to catch the next one, because there was no other way. On most days I walked six or seven kilometres before I sat in a classroom.
My target was IIT Delhi or Delhi College of Engineering. They were the only ones I knew by name. My aim was clear, but I had no idea of the path to it: which entrance exam, which preparation, who to ask. And there was the money. My father earned about US$30 a month, and engineering was far beyond what we could afford. That lack of awareness and that lack of money, not a lack of ability, are the reasons I did not sit an engineering entrance exam in 1995.
Chapter 2
We lived in an unauthorised colony where few people were educated. My parents asked for advice from the neighbours who knew a little more than they did, and those neighbours persuaded them. I was enrolled in a course I never wanted, one that came with a four-year bond. I told my parents again and again that I was not interested in it, but they could not repay the bond, so I had to finish all four years.
Those were the worst years of my life. I became depressed, I started to stammer, and my parents did not know the word "depression". I woke every morning asking myself why I was still alive, and went to sleep with the same question. For a long time I resented my parents and believed that if they had supported my dream my life would have been better. In my worst moment I decided to end my life. I did not, and I kept going.
Chapter 3
It took eight years before I decided to fight the depression first, and I took anti-depressants for two years. That fight changed how I understood my own story. My parents had not failed me. They did not know what they did not know. And I was not alone. Millions of students in India have the ability and no one who can afford or explain the path, and the system gives them no equal chance.
I worked for small organisations and did a part-time PGDBM in HR at IMT Ghaziabad (2008), a postgraduate programme recognised in India as equivalent to an MBA. I worked night shifts and went to classes in the morning. In 2001, while working nights as a data processor, a project contract was cancelled without warning. We were not allowed back into the building, and I spent that night on the roadside. I knew then that a career inside other people's organisations was not my destiny.
By then I had also finished a B.Com at the University of Delhi (1999), and I added an M.A. in English (2003), a B.Ed. (2010) and, at 36, the M.Sc. in Mathematics I had wanted at 17 (2014). Every one of them was earned while working.
Chapter 4
I had been giving tuitions alongside my job. In 2011 I left the job, gave tuitions full-time, and began laying the base for the foundation: meeting school principals, teachers and students. In 2012 I registered the Udgam Welfare Foundation as a non-profit. The aim was plain: to help children like me who dream of becoming engineers and cannot afford coaching. Our first project was a two-year free JEE coaching programme. We found our first ten students by pasting posters outside government schools.
Money was a daunting problem. After I left my job I took home tuitions and used what they paid for my own expenses and the NGO's. My friend Sanjeev has supported the foundation with a monthly contribution since the very beginning, and still does.
Running it alone had a cost I did not expect. I needed to give the work everything, so in 2012, when my daughter was in first standard, I decided she would live with her maternal grandparents and study at a school there. She is still there, and I see her at weekends. Most parents give their best time to their children. I gave mine to the children of the NGO. It is the biggest sacrifice I have made.
Chapter 5
Because it was a two-year JEE programme, I needed to know whether my students could compete with children who had expensive coaching from all over the country. I used the International Mathematics Olympiad as my yardstick before JEE. In 2015 one of our students was 36th in Delhi (Level II) and 628th internationally, and went on to IIT Kharagpur. In 2016 another, whose father is a security guard, was 18th in Delhi and 341st internationally, and went on to Delhi College of Engineering.
In the first batch, ten students began and three completed. One cracked JEE Advanced and went to IIT Kharagpur, and two joined mechanical and computer engineering at IP University.
The foundation's website lists 25+ students from 2014 to 2018 who reached engineering institutions: IIT Kharagpur and IIT Bhubaneswar, Delhi College of Engineering (now DTU), Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University, Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology and several IP University colleges, in computer science, electrical, mechanical, electronics and information technology. Their fathers are security guards, farmers, clerks, drivers, an electrician, a shopkeeper and a contract labourer. Some other students also cracked JEE but could not join because of financial constraints; they are not counted in this figure. One of our former students is now doing his PhD at Jamia Millia Islamia. These are the students I can document by name.
They are not the whole of it. Over the years I have taught, counselled and guided far more than a thousand children, in schools and at the foundation. I counselled students in schools, trained them on computers, and coached them for the Olympiad free of cost. I kept no records for most of them, so I do not claim results for them, only for the 25+ above.
I am trying to fulfil my own dream of 1995 through these children.
Chapter 6
The foundation also taught me to build, because there was nobody else to do it. In 2016 I wrote udgamwelfarefoundation.com by hand in HTML, my first website. In 2018 I moved it to WordPress so volunteers could publish. From 2012 I had worked on Linux and from 2014 I typeset mathematics in LaTeX, which is how mathstudy.in began: original maths e-books, worksheets and practice papers for school and competitive exams.
When COVID-19 struck in 2020, attendance at the NGO collapsed. I started a free online platform to keep students learning, and I treat that as the point where I became a developer. From 2021 I worked with AI tools, which made it possible for one person to rebuild everything on Node.js.
Chapter 7
I am the founder and sole developer of:
Chapter 8
Alongside this, I worked with The Lepra India Trust in Delhi to develop bilingual maths and English content for more than 40 hearing-impaired students, and hosted it free on the Udgam platform. That was service, not research, and I collected no outcome data from those students.
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
For years I told the story above as a success. Then, in 2025–26, I sat down to analyse my own records honestly. Of 393 students who enrolled between 2012 and 2020, about 37 completed the programme. The rest left. I had been running a filter, not a ladder, and "free" had done little for the children with the least support at home.
That reckoning became my research. In 2026 I published a pilot study of an AI-supported learning platform with low-income students (Review of Artificial Intelligence in Education, vol. 7, e01128), and a preprint, Free Is Not Enough, on EdArXiv. I treat the pilot as a first signal only: one group, high attrition, a ceiling on the instrument. I also supervised a conference paper and moderated a session at The Future of Education conference (June 2025).
Chapter 11
I am 48. I have spent more than twenty years in work and fifteen of them in education, and I have reached the edge of what I can learn alone. What I do not have is the training to prove, with evidence, what keeps children in education they cannot afford. I want to learn that method, and then give the tools back, so that the next teacher running a free programme can find out why children leave, and not only celebrate those who stay.