Pranjal Dubey: The Man Who Sold His House to Educate Youth in Rural Areas

Pranjal Dubey, a 40-year-old techie sold his house and gave up his lucrative job at SAP SE (a German multinational software corporation) to educate the youth in his ancestral village and providing them better job opportunities as well as improving their life.

Dubey has the dream of educating the local youth in his ancestral Sandalpur village in Dewas district, thereby improving their life through better job opportunities. He quit his job, sold his house and literally gave up everything he possessed to fulfill this dream. As a result, over 100 students of his college are currently working in IT giants such as Cognizant and SAP.

As per Dubey, the decision of leaving the job and the house was not an easy one to take. However, he felt that at some point of life every person needs to take some hard decision to fulfill their dreams and aim of life. The Sant Singaji Institute of Science and Management (SSISM) in Sandalpur, a Bootstrapping initiative for education of rural youth has changed the life of this successful techie.

It took near two years for Dubey and his family to understand what he was doing and what he wanted to do after leaving the secured life in Bengaluru that most of us dream to have. Dubey started the first batch in 2010 and took all the 50 students (all from a rural village background) to different cities of the country including Bengaluru to make them dream big in their life.

He worked hard to connect with the rural youth as his upbringing was completely different from what these village youth experienced. He took them for visits to the big multinationals such as Infosys, Biocon, SAP and many other firms to ignite their dreams and hunger for success. These visits helped them understand the bigger picture of life around them. After six years of struggle many students of his students are well placed at multinationals and earning handsomely.

Currently, he has taken the challenge of educating the girls in the village. It is even a bigger challenge for him as convincing the parents of girls in villages and assuring their security is still a constant struggle.

Watching his successful students is the biggest achievement of Debey’s life. He added that every family needs a role model to follow and bring the differences. His successful students are all role models for their families.

His institute is now covered over 200 villages across various districts and has strength of over 1000 students. According to Dubey, one of the major challenges is to protect the youth of the villages from the glamour of degree selling institutes. Villagers often get attracted to these degrees, but forget that in the current scenario being a degree holder is not everything and they need other soft skills like communication and presentation that they lack. Soft skills can only be improved by providing good exposure and practical opportunities to students.

With support of his mother Kalpana Dubey (61) and wife Amita Dubey (37) Pranjal Dubey has successfully accomplished his dreams. They went through the difficult paths and took some of the hardest decisions in life to make Dubey’s dream a reality. Amita told that the decision to give up their comfortable life in Bengaluru was not easy, but the family supported Pranjal’s decision for his happiness.

The post first appeared in KenFolios - Only interesting stories.