In 1974, I travelled as a young graduate student volunteer to join Kishore Bharati (KB), an organisation working for rural education and development in Palia Pipariya village on the eastern tip of Hoshangabad district in Madhya Pradesh. The train made a short halt at Pipariya station, leaving me with only faint memories of yet another nondescript small town. Over the next 20 years, however, Pipariya was to be my nearest market town, and eventually my home. It also became a major centre of KB's educational and social mobilisation activities.

After moving to Delhi in 1992, I continued to visit the town and kept in touch with its people. Over the years, the educational landscape of the town and the aspirations of its young population underwent a striking change. Young students started to enrol in private engineering and management colleges across the country. Graduates from the town gained employment in national and international companies in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, the United States (US), Europe and Canada. I was curious to know what developments had made these changes possible and who had been left behind.

On one such visit to Pipariya in 2018, I met two old friends: a couple who work as schoolteachers and who graduated from the Pipariya Government College (PGC). Hailing from the Other Backward Class (OBC) social category, they were among the last few young science and mathematics graduates recruited as permanent government schoolteachers in the mid-1980s. At their home, the couple introduced me to their two children who had completed secondary education in Pipariya.