Street vendor son of pani puri clears JEE, wins IIT on second try

Harsh Gupta, 19 years old from Maharashtra's Kalyan town took his failures as an inspiration and broke myths to secure a place at Roorkee's IIT. This is not a tale of brilliance in studies; this is a tale of determination, illness, poverty, and resistance.

 

Son of a street food vendor, Santosh Gupta, Harsh lives in the densely populated two-roomed chawl of Thane district with his parents, grandmother, and two younger brothers. The family supported by its modest earning had no access to facilities or information regarding high-end schools like IIT. Harsh did not even know about IIT until before his Class 10 boards, during the Covid-19 lockdown. His educational path since then has been anything but smooth.

 

He flunked Class 11, which led to a verbal thrashing by family and self-doubt. But Harsh never gave up. He, instead, regained confidence, returned to Class 11, passed Class 12 with merit, and scored 98.9 percentile in JEE Main. He even cracked JEE Advanced and got admission at IIT Roorkee on second attempt.

 

Harsh attributes most of his change to Motion Education, a Kota coaching institute where he got stern academic guidance and counseling. "There were times when I was exhausted physically and mentally. But Motion never lost belief in me. They believed in me even when I had so myself," Harsh asserted.

 

His professional life too was shadowed by medical hardship. He suffered from Rectal Prolapse, an intermittent, ever-present aching syndrome that prevented him from studying with successive hospitalizations. Apart from this, Harsh also experienced personal tragedy in the loss of his near and dear ones at critical exams.

 

Though all the challenges, he was not dissuaded. His dream and sacrificial spirit of his family pushed him to work even more diligently. He would read for 12 hours a day and would work part-time to support his brothers' education. "Dreams are meant to be big and so is the effort you have to make to chase them," he promises.

 

Harsh's story is not his. It is the story of hundreds of shattered dreams, broken attempts, and still getting up again—humiliated by the power of faith, imagination, and unbreakable will.