Hailing from a low-income family based in Uttar Pradesh’s village Shahranpur, Happy Kumar has faced many challenges during his online classes. Yet he is among the top scorers in CBSE 12th board exams and is now aspiring to crack engineering entrance JEE Main. The last session of JEE Mains is scheduled to be held by end of this month.

He has scored 91 percentile in the February attempt of JEE Mains, and 96 percentile in the March session.

“We have low internet connectivity in my area. I do not have a laptop and used to connect classes on phone and when I could get network,” he told news18.com. With schools being shut, Happy depended heavily on the video-based platform YouTube which allows flexibility of studying as per choice.

“There was coaching provided by the school for JEE over the weekends on Saturday and Sunday but got closed due to the pandemic. Hence, I have been self-studying. I have been relying on YouTube lessons on the engineering exam, and free courses from Unacademy to prepare for the exam,” says Happy.

This year, the class 12 students were scored based on their performance in class 10, 11 and 12th internals. Being a meritorious student all his life, Happy was expecting good scores in boards.

He has obtained a total of 496 marks out of 500. Happy has received 100 marks in chemistry, math, and information practice (IP). In physics and English, he received 98 marks, each.

He scored 99.2 per cent in the CBSE class 12 result 2021. He is among the top 70,000 students among the 14 lakh who took the exam.

Happy comes from an economically underprivileged background. He has studied from VidyaGyan, Bulandshahr – a school that offers free education to students from underprivileged backgrounds.

Happy’s father is a small scale grocery store owner and breadwinner of the family. His mother is a homemaker and he also has two siblings. While his sister is studying her second-year Bachelor of Arts (BA), his brother is in his first year.

He is now preparing for  Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) Mains — the engineering entrance exam. He aims a becoming a computer science engineer. “I like artificial technology (AI) and technology and want to study it,” says Happy.

While he has already taken admissions at Shiv Nadar University, Noida’s BTech in Computer Science course with the help of a scholarship, he will also sit for JEE Advanced – the IIT entrance exam.

If he passes the JEE Advanced, he plans to join either the IITs or NITs. “I would prefer IIT Kanpur, IIT Roorkee, or IIT Delhi as these are near my home,” adds Happy.

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