Pokhra, a nondescript village in Ballia district in Uttar Pradesh, is still counting the zeroes.
Animesh Anand is the son of Prakash Mishra, a school teacher in UP, and has secured a Rs 1.6 crore annual package with McKinsey & Company in the US.
Animesh is 31, currently doing his doctorate in microbiota, and he bagged the coveted job on the basis of his academic excellence.
His father said, “My wife Saroj took Animesh to Varanasi for schooling while I stayed back in Ballia. We lived apart for 18 years because there were no good English medium schools in Ballia and poor power supply was also an issue.”
His mother Saroj recalled, “From Class XII till his PhD at the University of Texas, Animesh bagged scholarships all the way. Me and my husband lived in different cities for 18 years for our son’s education and finally our sacrifice has paid off.”
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In 2009, when he was in Class 12, Animesh cracked the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana, a Central scholarship programme funded by the Department of Science and Technology, and was enrolled into the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Bhopal.
He completed the integrated course in 2014 before successfully cracking the prestigious Graduation Record Examination, a standardised test for admission in graduate schools in the US and Canada, and moved to Texas for doctoral studies.
He applied to the McKinsey portal and after several rounds of the interview, he was finally selected.
His mother said that that the hurdles he faced in his early years actually made him resilient and determined to achieve something big in life. “We hope that the job will also change the realities in Ballia,” she said.
Incidentally, Animesh’s elder sister Ankita is also an engineer in the US.
Meanwhile, Rajwant Lal, a resident of Pokhra village, said, “We are all delighted at the success of this boy. I do not know exactly what subject he has been pursuing or what his job details are, but I am very happy for his father whom we call ‘masterji’.”