The tag IIT instantly paints a picture in our head – a white collar job with a luxurious lifestyle and living the life which the middle-class society can only dream of!
Today, we will meet an ex-IITian professor who sacrificed all of this and embraced a path to help the downtrodden tribals in Madhya Pradesh.
Meet Alok Sagar who pursued engineering from IIT Delhi and a PhD degree from Houston. Amongst his many students, one of them was Raghuram Rajan (the ex-RBI governor).
He resigned from his job in 1982 and shifted to a district village in Kochamu which had 750 tribals. The village, till date, has no access to electricity and roads.
He has been helping tribals in Betul and Hoshangabad districts of MP.
He owns three pairs of kurtas and travels by a cycle to collect and distribute seeds among tribals and is closely associated with Shramik Adivasi Sangathan.
While he had the option to sit in an air-conditioned office and work, Alok digressed from that life and chose this.
He chose to put his degree and education to some better use.
He believes in working at grassroot levels and commented:
“In India, people are facing so many problems, but people are busy proving their intelligence by showing their degrees rather than serving people.”
Thanks to Betul’s district elections, we know about this great man who took it upon his shoulders to change lives.
That’s so incredible.
While writing about him, I remembered the movie, Swades, where SRK gave up his life in America to work for his village. That proved to be “AHA! moment” for many Indians, but people like Mr. Alok Sagar gave wings to that thought in reality.
More power to you, sir!
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