Lifetime Achievement in Education Leadership 2013

Achyuta Samanta, Founder-Director of KIIT University & Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences

CITATION

Born in a remote village (Kalarabank) in Cuttack district as one of six children of a shopfloor employee in a steel plant, Samanta and his siblings experienced grinding poverty after their father died in a train accident in 1970. “It was quite routine in those difficult days for us to eat one square meal in two days, and my mother lacked a second saree to wear after bathing in the village river,” he told EducationWorld which published a cover story on KIIT/KISS in April 2012.

Nevertheless Samanta stayed the course in his village school and won a scholarship to SCS College, Puri in 1984, through which he supported himself by giving private tuitions. In 1987, by “self-studying 18 hours per day and subsisting on Rs.200 per month”, he earned a Masters in chemistry from Utkal University and landed a job as a lecturer in D.K. College, Jaleswar (1987-91) and later at the Maharishi College, Bhubaneswar. In 1993 he promoted Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) on the side, even as he routinely suffered public ridicule and societal indifference.

Since then over the past 20 years, KISS has graduated 3,248 class X and 2,241 class XII tribal children, transforming Odisha and Eastern India into one of the country’s fast-track industrial states and regions.

In 1992 Samanta promoted the Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT). Since it introduced its first undergraduate study programme in 1997, KIIT has rapidly spawned 23 schools of professional education — medical, dental, nursing, business management, law, fashion, rural management, bio-technology, film and media sciences, yoga and spiritualism, among others — which currently host 15,250 students mentored by 1,200 faculty and 2,300 support staff. These schools and students are housed in KIIT University’s 19 state-of-the-art campuses with an aggregate built-up area of 8 million sq. ft, scattered over 350 acres across Bhubaneswar.  Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology is ranked among India’s top 100 non-IIT engineering colleges (#90) by EducationWorld (June 2013). KIIT and KIIT University have contributed 11,957 graduates, 7,914 postgraduates and 61 Ph Ds to Indian society.

Yet perhaps an even greater achievement of Dr. Samanta is the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences. This unique institution provides free-of-charge K-XII and undergraduate education to 15,000, mainly first generation students speaking 30 tribal languages, for whom even Oriya is unfamiliar. With a built-up area of 600,000 sq. ft, KISS is the world’s largest boarding school equipped with a 50 kw solar power plant, an RO water filtration plant which supplies 100,000 litres of potable water daily, and a fully mechanised kitchen which serves 45,000 meals per day in a dining hall with a seating capacity of 10,000. It has 15,000 students residing in 10 dormitories equipped with 11,000 two-tier and three-tier beds, and utilising 800 shower-bathrooms and 800 toilets, amenities wholly unfamiliar to tribal children.

For his extraordinary contributions for the development of Indian education — and upliftment of tribal children —the Board of Directors and Editors of EducationWorld are proud to present the Lifetime Achievement in Education Leadership 2013 Award to Dr. Achyuta Samanta.