On weaver’s sons, a civil servant who teaches at 4am, and the oldest idea in education that we keep forgetting
Dr Arun Prakash
Let me begin with a village.
Patwa Toli. Manpur block, Gaya district, Bihar. A community of weavers — patwa means weaver — who for generations made their living producing the humble gamcha, that thin cotton towel you see tucked into the waistband of farmers, labourers, rickshaw pullers across this country. The village was so prolific at this trade that people called it the Manchester of Bihar. According to Outlook India, gamchas worth approximately ₹100 crore are produced there every single year. Every fifth house has a loom.
And in nearly every house, there is also an engineer.
More than 300 students from this one settlement have secured admissions to IITs. Another 500-plus have gone to NITs and government engineering colleges. Every year, 15 to 20 young people from Patwa Toli clear JEE — one of the most punishing competitive examinations on earth. In 2025, more than 40 students cleared JEE Main in a single session, according to DNA India. In 2023, a boy from this village named Gulshan Kumar scored a perfect 100 percentile in JEE Mains.
One hundred percentile. From a weaver’s family in Gaya.
No celebrity coach. No hostel in Kota. No family with the means to spend two lakh rupees on a year of preparation.
Just a community that decided, sometime around 1991, that education was the only loom worth running — and then backed that decision not with money, but with each other.
I want you to hold that image. Because I think it contains everything important we have forgotten about how learning actually works.
How It Started
In 1991, a young man named Jitendra Kumar — a weaver’s son, born and raised in Patwa Toli — cleared the JEE and secured admission to IIT-BHU, Varanasi. He was the first. From the entire village, the first.
When he returned home in 1997, having been selected by an American company, the village gave him a hero’s welcome. Outlook India records that from that day, people in Patwa Toli started adding the words “IITian” and “America” before his name.
Now here is the part that matters most, and the part that tends to get skipped in the telling.
Jitendra Kumar came back. Not just once, to be celebrated. He came back to talk to the younger boys. To explain what IIT was. What JEE required. What was possible. And then, as Indica News which interviewed him at a Bihar Foundation event in 2025 reports, he helped build a system — a peer learning chain — where students who had already cleared the exam would return during their college holidays to coach those still preparing.
Seniors teaching juniors. Year after year. For free. Out of love and obligation and a sense that what had been given to them needed to be passed on.
By 1999, seven more students from the village had made it to IIT. They formed a group called Nav Prayas — New Effort. And the chain kept going.
That chain, Village Square notes, has now produced over 300 IITians and 500-plus engineering graduates from a single weaver’s settlement in Gaya. The literacy rate of Patwa Toli today, according to the founder of Vriksh Be The Change — the community organisation that institutionalised this movement in 2013 — is 98 percent.
Bihar’s overall literacy rate is among the lowest in India.
Patwa Toli: 98 percent.
When you read that gap, sit with it for a moment. That gap is not the result of a government scheme. It is not the output of a coaching institute or an NGO with foreign funding. It is what happens when a community decides, collectively and without any formal announcement, that it will not leave its children behind.
The Idea Underneath the Story
What Patwa Toli rebuilt — without naming it, without reading about it in any education journal — is something very old.
The gurukul was not a school in the sense we use that word today. It had no fee structure, no syllabus committee, no annual report. What it had was a community organised entirely around the transmission of knowledge — where the guru learned from teaching, the student learned from living, and the whole thing was held together not by an institution but by shraddha. That word sits somewhere between faith, reverence, and commitment. There is no clean English translation for it.
In the gurukul, knowledge was not delivered. It was lived. The student woke before dawn with the guru. Cooked. Worked. Asked questions at odd hours. Learned not just the subject but the way of thinking that made the subject alive. The guru did not teach for money. The student repaid not in fees but in guru dakshina — an offering that was always more symbolic than material, a recognition that what had been transmitted could never be fully settled in currency.
Knowledge was a fire. And fire, by nature, is passed from flame to flame.
This is not nostalgia. This is a description of how human beings actually learn. We learn in relationship. We learn from people who are invested in us — not as customers, not as admission numbers, but as people. We learn from those who are only a few steps ahead — close enough to remember the struggle, present enough to care about the outcome.
Patwa Toli understood this instinctively. Jitendra Kumar coming home to sit with his village’s younger boys — that is the gurukul. Not in form. In spirit.
The Civil Servant Who Teaches at Four in the Morning
Now let me tell you about a man in Allahabad.
His name is Virendra Ojha. He is a 1993-batch IRS officer — Indian Revenue Service — currently posted as Principal Commissioner of Income Tax. He is also, in whatever hours remain after a full working day in one of India’s more demanding civil services postings, a novelist, a poet, and an ultra-distance runner who covers 10 to 15 kilometres every morning before his office day begins.
And he runs a free coaching programme for UPSC aspirants called Margdarshan — which means, simply, guidance.
Indian Masterminds, which profiled him, describes his house as having an open library at the front and a classroom at the back. He gets up at 4am. He runs. He writes. He goes to office. And then — finding time for teaching, as he told the interviewer, is the most difficult part — he takes online lectures for civil services aspirants across the country, reaching students in small towns and remote villages who could never afford to come to Delhi or Allahabad for coaching.
How did this begin? He told Indian Masterminds: “I am an ultra-distance runner doing inter-city weekend runs. It was during one such run that I found underprivileged school-bound students gawking at my beacon-fitted car. They asked me can they too get this red beacon car — and that triggered the thought of training students like them to be civil servants.”
A child staring at a government car on a roadside. An IRS officer stopping to think about what that child sees. Margdarshan was born from that pause.
Ojha doesn’t charge a single penny from his students and instead extends monetary help to the needy ones. He has a YouTube channel, two Facebook pages, a Telegram channel, and a website — virendraojha.com — all carrying his lectures, reaching aspirants in villages with nothing but an internet connection and a dream.
He said something to Vibes of India that I want to quote directly, because it cuts to the heart of everything I am trying to say in this article: “The problem with commercial coaching classes is that making money is their primary motive and teaching is secondary to them. Second issue is, most teachers haven’t cleared UPSC exams themselves and so they have little idea of the kind of students who face the severity of the exam.”
A serving civil servant. Running a free coaching programme in his personal time. From the front room of his house.
Virendra Ojha may not be an exception. He is a reminder. A reminder that there are others like him across this country — alumni who made it, professionals who remember where they came from, retired teachers with decades of knowledge in their hands — all of whom have something to give. And most of whom have never been asked.
What Was Always There
Here is what strikes me most about both of these stories — Patwa Toli and Margdarshan.
Neither of them was designed. Neither received a grant or a government mandate. Neither was the result of a policy paper or a conference recommendation. Both grew from a single, simple, very old impulse: I know something. Someone behind me needs it. I will turn around.
That impulse is what the gurukul was built on. And it is not dead. It is dormant. Waiting to be called upon.
We have surrounded ourselves with the infrastructure of learning — schools, coaching centres, online platforms, digital curricula — and somehow, in building all of that, we have crowded out the one thing that actually drives learning. The human chain. The senior who turns back. The community that says: your success is our success, and your failure is our failure, and neither of you is alone in this.
The coaching industry did not kill this impulse. It simply filled the space we left empty when we forgot to tend it.
The Call — and It Is Sincere
This is not a lament. This is an invitation.
If you are reading this as a parent, ask yourself: what do I know that my child’s school community could use? Not money. Knowledge. Time. A skill. A story. A connection. Schools cannot be islands. They need the community to flow through them — not just on Sports Day and Annual Prize Distribution, but in the regular, unglamorous, irreplaceable work of showing children what a life built on learning looks like.
If you are reading this as an alumnus of any institution — school, college, university — ask yourself when you last turned back. When you last sat with someone still on the path you have already walked and said: here is what I know, here is what I wish I had known, here is what is possible.
If you are reading this as an educator, ask yourself honestly: is your school’s relationship with its community a real relationship — or is it a PR exercise? Are the parents in your school co-authors of the education you are trying to provide — or are they customers who pay and wait?
If you are reading this as a civil servant, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, an entrepreneur — someone who made it through a competitive system and came out the other side — ask yourself what Virendra Ojha asked himself on that morning run in Ahmedabad. What does the child staring at your car see? And what are you doing about it?
India has more educated people than at any point in its history. We have engineers, doctors, administrators, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs — millions of them, scattered across every city and every field. Each of them carries, in their memory, the map of a journey that someone younger is trying to make right now. Without a map. Often without money. Often without anyone to ask.
The coaching industry exists because we have not shown up. Every time a community steps up — every Patwa Toli, every Margdarshan, every Chandrakant Pateshwari who gave up a Bengaluru career to come home and open a library in his house — it proves that the alternative was always available. We just weren’t using it.
This is the oldest idea in education. It predates every institution, every syllabus, every examination board.
You know something. Someone behind you needs it. Turn around.
The gurukul did not have a building. It had that gesture. And everything that came from it — every text, every tradition, every generation of learning passed forward across five thousand years of this civilisation — came from that gesture, repeated endlessly, by ordinary people who decided that what they had been given was not theirs to keep.
Patwa Toli is not a miracle. It is a memory.
It is India remembering what it always knew.
The question is not whether more such communities can be built. The question is whether you — reading this right now, wherever you are — are willing to be the Jitendra Kumar of your own neighbourhood. The Virendra Ojha of your own city. The Chandrakant Pateshwari of your own street.
The fire does not need a new invention.
It needs someone to turn around and pass it on.
Sources and Credits : Village Square — Vishal Kumar, May 2025 · Outlook India — Md. Asghar Khan, June 2025 · The Better India, June 2017 · DNA India, April 2025 · Indica News, April 2025 · Indian Masterminds — “A Superhuman Bureaucrat”, September 2020 · Vibes of India — Janvi Sonaiya, November 2021 · Vriksh Be The Change — vrikshbethechange.org · virendraojha.com