For Rahul Bhatia, preparing for the JEE did not begin in a coaching classroom.
It began at home, with a determination to make the most of whatever was available to him.
Rahul had always enjoyed mathematics, particularly the satisfaction of working through a problem and finding a solution. He was also interested in understanding how things work in the real world. Over time, this interest in numbers, logic and problem-solving led him naturally towards engineering.
Like many students aspiring to study engineering, Rahul wanted to join a coaching programme for the JEE. However, his family’s financial circumstances made that impossible. His father is a small-scale farmer in Surajgarh, Rajasthan, growing crops such as gram and bajra. Farming is the family’s main source of income, but the land is not particularly fertile and low rainfall makes each year’s earnings uncertain. To supplement the family’s income, Rahul’s father also works as a daily wage labourer whenever work is available. Whenever possible, his mother enrols in the government’s rural employment programme, NREGA, which provides 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every rural household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work, thereby contributing whatever additional income she can to the household.
In these circumstances, expensive JEE coaching was simply not an option. So Rahul prepared on his own.
He turned to freely available online resources and built his own way of studying. For Mathematics and Physics, he followed lectures by Mohit Tyagi on YouTube. For Chemistry, he practised with resources from Physics Wallah. Without the structure and support of a formal coaching institute, Rahul had to find his own discipline, plan his own preparation, and keep going when the process became difficult.
His effort paid off and Rahul scored 93.4% in Class 12 and cleared JEE Main in 2025. He earned admission to the National Institute of Technology, Silchar, where he is now pursuing a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering. But getting into college was only the first hurdle. Rahul’s family had to borrow money from relatives to pay his first-year college fees. With tuition fees and the cost of living away from home, continuing his education remains a significant financial challenge for the family.
Despite these pressures, Rahul has continued to make the most of his time at NIT Silchar. He participated in Tecnoesis, the institute’s annual techno-management festival, as part of a team working on a Robowar project. The team built a combat robot, and Rahul contributed to the coding and design of the vehicle. The experience allowed him to move beyond textbooks and apply his interest in engineering to a hands-on project that required technical knowledge, teamwork, and problem-solving.
Through the Shiksha Sankalp Lakshya Scholarship, Rahul will receive support that can help ease the financial pressure on his family and allow him to focus more fully on his education. For a student whose first year of college began with borrowed money, this support represents more than help with fees. It gives him greater stability as he continues building the future he has worked hard to reach.
Rahul hopes to build a career in areas such as renewable energy and smart grids and, eventually, contribute to India’s transition towards more sustainable and efficient energy systems.
For now, he is doing what he has always done: learning, solving problems, and making the most of the opportunities in front of him.
