Tata Motors helps 3,400 students enrol in India’s top engineering and medical schools; 40 percent of them are women

Deepak Sahu of Chattarpur, Madhya Pradesh and Krishnanshu Tanwar of Bharatpur district, Rajasthan have many things in common. They are both medical students, have studied in Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya (JNV) schools, both raised in humble families for whom education was a luxury. 

While Deepak scored 715/720 in NEET 2020 and an all-India rank of 5, and joined AIIMS Delhi, Krishnanshu scored 705/720 in NEET 2020 with an all-India rank of 53 and is now studying at Maulana Azad Medical College, Delhi.

Striving to help deserving students like Krishnanshu and Deepak secure a place in the country’s premier higher education institutes through quality coaching, Mumbai-based Tata Motors launched the Engineering and NEET (National Eligibility Entrance Test) Admission Bridge Accelerated Learning Engagement initiative—ENABLE in January 2021 in association with the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti (NVS), Avanti Fellows and Ex-Navodayan Foundation.

ENABLE is a digitally-enabled remote learning initiative that prepares talented class 11 and 12 students studying across 552 Jawahar Navodalaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) in the country to take JEE and NEET competitive exams, providing access to resources and guidance that might otherwise not be easily available to them.

As per a company statement, in FY22, Tata Motors helped 3,400 students enrol in India’s top engineering and medical schools, 40 percent of which are women. ENABLE extends field-leading, free-of-cost coaching with targeted mentoring and continuous evaluation, supported by the benefits of a digital medium. With 20 times less cost per successful student as compared to any other premier coaching programme in the country, ENABLE has helped create a 10-fold increase in access to elite colleges in STEM. Overall, 35 percent of the students supported by this programme make it to prestigious engineering and medical institutes of the country.

Vinod Kulkarni, CSR Head, Tata Motors, said, “ENABLE is focused on helping augment the efforts of secondary school students in their journey towards transitioning into higher education and strives to provide promising youth from underserved communities all the help they need to make their engineering and medical aspirations come true. The initiative is fundamentally underscored by the benefits of digitisation and has helped us expand accessibility significantly, with remarkable results from enrolled students across India. In the coming years we hope to magnify the scope and impact of ENABLE, helping many more talented children fulfil their dreams.”

The programme was first executed in Puducherry in 2011 and later replicated in JNVs across Mangalore, Palghar, Kolhapur and Rajgir. It transitioned to a digital learning model in January 2021, massively expanding to the entire JNV system across 26 states and eight union territories in the country.

Tata Motors added that since inception over 45,000 students have been a part of ENABLE. In the academic year 2021-22, over 10,500 students appeared for JEE exams, of which 42 percent qualified JEE Mains and 11 percent cleared JEE Advanced. 70 percent of these qualifying JEE Advanced were ranked in top 10,000 and 38 percent of them made it into IITs, while the rest joined other top colleges. For NEET, 12 percent of the qualifying students made it to the top 10 medical institutes.

Going forward, the programme hopes to place 15,000 students into high employability STEM courses like engineering, medicine, pharmacy, nursing and agriculture, the company continued.