Kahaan gaye woh toppers?

Ever wondered what happened to those guys who topped the IIT-JEE exams? Wondered where they are, what kind of career they are pursuing? We said “guys” and not “guys and girls” because till date not a single girl has topped the exam.

After they top, they become the face smiling down at you from their “class” hoarding, they are seen in all TV channels and newspapers; basically they are celebrated. But later? In a month or two, even within IIT no one cares, all are back to the study bench, where you are as good as your last exam only.

The 2000 year topper, Nitin Gupta is thankfully not in USA but very much in India,  currently an assistant professor at IIT-Kanpur’s biological and bioengineering department. 2001 topper Arvind Thiagarajan joined IIT Madras, went on to complete his Masters and PhD from MIT, USA and is now working as a research scientist at Amazon.2002 topper, Dungara Ram Choudhary now works with Oracle in USA. Nothing much in known about 2003 topper but 2004 topper Sushant Sachdeva is working as a post-doctoral associate and instructor at Yale University’s computer science department.  2005 topper Piyush Srivastava is postdoctorate scholar at the California Institute of Technology. 2006 topper, Raghu Mahajan Mahajan is at Stanford University pursuing a PhD in theoretical physics. 2008 topper Kashyap Kashyap is now at Canada’s University of Waterloo, where he is completing a PhD in quantum computing. 2009 topper, Nitin Jain lives in Dublin, Ireland.

There have been more than 50 toppers of IIT JEE since the first IIT was set up in 1956 in Kharagpur. And barring a handful, most are in USA or Canada, working with academia or in Google, Amazon, Microsoft. Is this what students aspire to get into IIT – only to fly away one day to never come back? Isn’t that our failure in a big way that we cannot retain this talent in India.