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.

In 2006, the trust began organising mock board exams in school settings to help ease exam jitters.

Over 1,000 students participate every year. And when NEET competition grew fierce in 2018, he added free preparatory material to help level the playing field for rural aspirants.

But Raguraman’s work doesn’t stop with academics. In 2012, he published ‘Golden Hour’, a first-aid manual with easy illustrations and step-by-step guide. More than 20,000 copies have been handed out — to traffic police, students and members of the public.

This year, he turned his focus to consumer safety. His new book, a 128-page guide on food adulteration, lists methods to detect adulterants in over 120 common items like oil, milk and spices. Priced at Rs 70, nearly 5,000 copies have already found their way to homes and shops across the district.

The Aram Trust has also ventured into areas of quiet dignity. At a palliative care centre in Coimbatore, Raguraman helps fulfil final wishes of terminally ill patients — from reuniting with distant relatives to enjoying their favourite home-cooked meal. In 2018, he organised a hair donation drive that saw over 100 women cut and donate their locks to make wigs for cancer patients.

Yet, education remains closest to his heart. Each year, he arranges field trips for over 100 students to dairy farms, science museums, and cottage industries. The aim, he says, is to show young minds a world beyond textbooks.

“I always believed that life should mean something to society, once our family’s needs are taken care of,” he says. “In the early 2000s, I saw rural students struggling to get hold of exam guides. When I saw the positive impact our Q&A books had on their

results, I knew I had to keep going.”As the summer holidays come to a close and classrooms are readied for a new academic year, Raguraman, too, feels the familiar excitement.

While students get ready to step into their classrooms, he, too, is ready to walk through the school corridors again, carrying with him the quiet determination to help shape their future, one book at a time.

(Edited by Adarsh TR)