On a quiet lane in Miyapur, a fast-growing northwestern suburb of Hyderabad lined with gated apartment complexes and IT campuses, there is an unusual classroom — an overhead water tank, squat and cylindrical, gifted to a teacher who had simply run out of space.

Inside, and in the modest rooms built around it over the years, students bend over textbooks every evening while their parents guard the gates of the very buildings that tower above them.

This is where Akula Kalyani once studied. Her father worked as a security guard, and through the support system built inside this converted water tank in Miyapur, she completed engineering studies. Today, she earns Rs 20 lakh a year as a software engineer.

But she is not an outlier. By now, she is part of a pattern.

A teacher who could not look away

Pothukuchi Srinivas began teaching at a government school in Miyapur in the mid-1990s after a teacher asked him to help because there were only two teachers for 300 students. At the time, Srinivas was employed at a German company and would go to the school after finishing his shift to teach social studies.

It was there that something shifted in him. One day, a student had not completed his homework. When Srinivas asked why, the boy explained that he spent his evenings cleaning three tea carts after school and had no electricity at home to study.

Srinivas began visiting students’ homes after that. What he found stayed with him. Most of the children came from families of watchmen, domestic workers and auto drivers.

“It is not the student’s fault; the system has failed them,” he says.

That........

© The Better India