04-05-2025
- General
- New Indian Express
Friend-circle guide to help kids ace test
COIMBATORE: The sunlight filtering into a quiet government school classroom in Coimbatore lands gently on a row of determined young faces. It's late afternoon and the Class 12 students with their heads bent over spiral-bound textbooks are deep in preparation.
These thick Q&A books of 1,000 pages each aren't provided by the school. However, for Tamil-medium students preparing for board exams, they are nothing short of essential. What makes them remarkable isn't just the content — it's the man behind them.
P Raguraman, a 49-year-old civil contractor, has quietly spent the past two decades building more than just homes. Through his Kovai 'Aram Arrakkattalai' (Aram Trust), he's been assembling and distributing study guides to thousands of underprivileged students (classes 10 and 12) across Coimbatore for free of cost.
It started in 2003, when Raguraman noticed students in rural areas struggling to access exam materials. Many of them relied on torn library books or borrowed notes that were often incomplete.
Seeing this gap, he reached out to educators, including retired teachers, and compiled a comprehensive Q&A guide that would cover the entire syllabus, something rural students could lean on during their most crucial academic years.
'For the first 10 years, I printed 5,000 books annually and personally distributed them to students in classes 10 and 12,' says Raguraman. 'Later, I scaled it down to 1,000 for each grade due to financial constraints. A friend in Sivakasi prints them at a low cost, and I still visit the schools myself to hand them over.'
Each book costs around Rs 300 to print. A circle of 20 long-time friends has quietly backed the effort since the beginning — one of them runs the printing press, offering the service at zero profit. The guides in Tamil include past board questions, model answers, and memory aids aligned with the state syllabus, all vetted for accuracy by experienced teachers.
At a time when private tuition centres and coaching apps dominate urban education, Raguraman's hand-delivered books continue to serve students in schools that lack even the basics. The message that travels with every book? That someone out there is rooting for them.
