Students stake it all for an entry into the IITs. Will an 80 percent cut-off in the board exams act as a spoiler?
Abhisekh Kumar is an ordinary guy from Jamshedpur. He scored 76 percent in his 10+2 exams, dropped a year to prepare for the Indian Institute of Technology Joint Entrance Exam (IIT JEE) and cracked it in the first attempt. In 2006, Kumar graduated from IIT Bombay with a cumulative grade point average of 8.34 (maximum is 10), ranking third in his batch. He worked for a few years, didn’t like what he was doing, quit, and started eveningflavours.com, a Bangalore-based food & beverages portal, with three other IITian friends in February 2009.
(This story appears in the 20 November, 2009 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)