Avanti Fellows is an award-winning non-profit organization established by two IIT alumni- Akshay Saxena & Krishna Ramkumar in 2010 with the support of the Pan-IIT alumni organization. Both Akshay and Krishna came from successful corporate careers; Krishna a former gold-medalist at IIT Bombay and Akshay out of the MBA program at Harvard Business School. The goal was straight-forward - to give every student the opportunity to study at India’s best colleges. It was established with the aim to provide affordable, high-quality education to disadvantaged students aspiring to study at India’s top universities.

At Avanti, a unique pedagogy is implemented called Peer Instruction®. This pedagogy reduces teacher dependence and enables collaborative learning amongst students. Over the past 7 years, they have shown that their students outperform the most expensive after-school programs in the country at less than one-fourth the cost. Till date they have been able to send 102 students in top 100 engineering colleges of the country.

Today, Avanti has over 50 full-time employees & 100 volunteers, and supports over 2400 students in 16 locations across 3 government school systems spread over 5 states – Corporation of Chennai, Navodaya Vidyalayas and Haryana Government Schools.

The problem of educational inequality and disparity is what got their founders together to take the first steps towards fighting this injustice. They truly believe that by giving determined students the tools and guidance to move forward, they can acquire their seats in the most prestigious institutions of the country.