Empowering the poorest through education

[Sultan Mahmud Sujon]

One needs a lot of conviction to bring the tribal children from the lap of poverty and give them all the necessities of life, money can buy. The story of his life is a journey from abject poverty to opulence and to sacrificing of opulence for the uplift of the people languishing in poverty with consequent attendance of ignorance and neglect

Leader – Dr Achyuta Samanta
Organisation – KISS and KIIT
Vision – To provide quality education and opportunity to the poorest-ofthe-poor indigenous tribal children for their all round development
Establishment Year – KISS (1993) and KIIT (2004)
Reach – KISS (20,000 tribal children) and KIIT (over 20,000 students)

His simple vegetarian food, inexpensive dressing and endearing smile speak a lot about him. Dr Achyuta Samanta drew positive inspirations and worldly wisdom from his childhood tribulations and grew up wholesomely to chase a vision of a world sans hunger and illiteracy and to bring smile on the faces of the socio-economically challenged indigenous tribal community of Odisha.
Having grown up in a dilapidated thatch-roofed house and nurtured them mostly with rice gruel and wild spinach because that was everyday hard menial work by his mother could fetch, Dr Samanta, followed the elderly boys to reach the school. Surprised by his keenness to study, the headmaster of the school took him in the school and from there started Dr Samanta’s academic journey- from primary school to high school, from high school to college, and from college to university finally endowing himself with a meritorious degree of the Masters in Chemistry that landed him in a lecturer’s job in a college in Bhubaneswar.


His childhood struggle for survival and education stirred him endlessly and a strange spirit began to possess him. While he was pursuing his college education in Puri and later postgraduate education in Utkal University in Bhubaneswar, the young Samanta used to augment his paltry scholarship money to meet his expenses by rendering tutoring service to school students and this led him to discover an entrepreneur in him.

He became occupied with his entrepreneurial abilities and he looked forward to empowering the hapless unemployable young children who failed to make it big in the academic field. With Rs 5000, all that he had saved from his not very big income from the teaching job, Dr Samanta started an Industrial Training Institute in 1993 in a two-roomed rented building in Bhubaneswar.


Dr Samanta’s visionary mind and adept cincts of KIIT for providing free education to the tribal children with free lodging and boarding facilities. This fledgling school has now grown into a mammoth tribal residential school providing free education from Kindergarten to Postgraduation, free lodging and boarding with all modern amenities and state-ofthe- art-technology-empowered independent campus to over 20, 000 children and youth belonging to the poorest-ofthe- poor indigenous tribal communities; a feat hailed as only one of its kind in whole of the world. Establishment of KIIT and KISS shows just a small facet of Dr Samanta’s multifaceted personality. His respect for mothers wish and his commitment to the routes transformed his remote village Kalarabanka to a model one by providing all facilities and amenities of city life. With his faith and beliefs strongly founded on right effort and perfect maneuvering, he works for a genuine social cause and the success inevitably follows like providence and this has remained the mantra for his stupendous success. It is the love for humanity that inspires him to stand as apart as a class of his own in the midst of the crowd of philanthropists. hands weaved an educational institution that has become a model for emulation.


KIIT Group of Institutions, which had started a decade and a half ago with an Industrial Training Institute, has become the largest educational conglomerate in Bhubaneswar. Encompassing over 500 acres of prime land, KIIT today stands with 7.5 million square feet of built-up area in immaculately architected buildings cut into 20 contiguous independent sprawling campuses with state-of-theart facilities. Starting from Engineering, MCA and MBA, KIIT has added programmes like Rural Management, Law, Bio-technology, Medical Sciences, Nursing, Dental sciences, Fashion Technology, Cinema and Media Studies, Sculpture Studies, Humanities, Languages, Yoga and Spiritual studies to its fold over a short span of 16 years.


By about the same time when KIIT was beginning to shape up, Dr Samanta had already weaved a plan to empower the marginalised poorest-of-the-poor indigenous tribal children of the state by providing a level playing field. With the conviction that ‘illiteracy breeds poverty and literacy eradicates it’, he established in 1993 a small school, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS), within the precincts of KIIT for providing free education to the tribal children with free lodging and boarding facilities. This fledgling school has now grown into a mammoth tribal residential school providing free education from Kindergarten to Postgraduation, free lodging and boarding with all modern amenities and state-ofthe- art-technology-empowered independent campus to over 20, 000 children and youth belonging to the poorest-ofthe- poor indigenous tribal communities; a feat hailed as only one of its kind in whole of the world.


Establishment of KIIT and KISS shows just a small facet of Dr Samanta’s multifaceted personality. His respect for mothers wish and his commitment to the routes transformed his remote village Kalarabanka to a model one by providing all facilities and amenities of city life.
With his faith and beliefs strongly founded on right effort and perfect maneuvering, he works for a genuine social cause and the success inevitably follows like providence and this has remained the mantra for his stupendous success. It is the love for humanity that inspires him to stand as apart as a class of his own in the midst of the crowd of philanthropists.