IIT-JEE coaching pioneer to down shutters after 57 years

A Mumbai-based institution has decided to slip quietly into history. Agrawal Classes, that large blue neonlit sign seen from the Dadar flyover, will turn its lights off as the coaching institute has decided to down its shutters after sharpening a million minds for 57 years. G. D. Agrawal, who started tutoring children in maths at his Matunga home, is today in his eighth decade, with none of his heirs ready to carry on with his dream of teaching science. “We are no longer taking students. We have decided to shut down the class. It’s the final decision that the owner has taken,” the woman at the admissions counter said on Wednesday.

So, many of its alumni, including Nadir B. Godrej (1969) of Godrej Industries, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani (1975), Mahendra Choksi (1960) and Ashwin Dani (1961) of Asian Paints and Phaneesh Murthy (1980) of iGate Global Solutions, will, while passing through Dadar, be greeted by the blank facade of Harganga Mahalthe building they once went to every morning to learn the fundamentals of science.

After the initial eight years, Agrawal moved out of his home to a place in Dadar TT, then the heart of Bombay, and soon expanded his menu of courses to include physics, chemistry and English. In 1962, its first year of coaching students preparing to get into the IITs, V. D. Hattangadi bagged the all India rank 1, the news making Agrawal Classes the top destination for engineering aspirants in the country. The tagline, “Ideal for Scholars” said it all the class admitted only top rankers and promised to make them even better. Go-getters would come to the city just to be coached at Agrawal. “If you made it to Agrawal, you knew you had made it,” said an old student. While the number of students it admitted went up every year, the values that Agrawal started will never change.

Source: The Times of India, December 30, 2010