Desperate to make the grade: in one of India's poorest regions, a driven 17-year-old dreams of someday working at NASA.

• Author: Sengupta, Somini

Anupam Kumar, 17, is the eldest son of a scooter-rickshaw driver. He lives in a three-room house made of bricks and a tin roof, where water rarely comes out of the tap and the electricity is off more than on. The home sits on a narrow unpaved alley in Patna, a city in northeastern India (see map, p. 17), one of the country's most destitute corners.

Anupam is good at math. He has taught himself practically everything he knows, and when he grows up, he wants to work at NASA and investigate whether there is life in outer space.

"It's becoming very important to explore other planets because this planet is becoming too polluted," he says with deadly seriousness. Next door to his house, pigs rifle through a pile of garbage on an empty lot.

His mother, a savvy woman with a sixth-grade education, cools him with a palm-frond fan. His father, who made it through 10th grade, flashes a bemused smile. "He has high-level aims," he says.

For nov,, Anupam's sole obsession is to gain admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology. Known as I.I.T., it's a network of seven elite colleges established shortly after Indian independence in 1947 (see Times Past, p. 16) that produces a yearly crop of tech wizards.

It is hard to overstate the difficulty of getting in. Of 198,059 indians who took the rigorous admissions tests in 2005, 3,890 got in--an acceptance rate of less than 2 percent. (Harvard accepts 10 percent.)

Anupam does not know anyone who has attended the institutes, nor do his parents. But they all know this: If he makes it, it would change his family's fortunes forever. "I feel a lot of pressure," he says. "It's from inside."

GRAY AT 17

A voice in his head, he says, tells him he must do something to rescue his family from want, and that he must do it very soon. The constant stress is making his hair gray. That's why Anupam's mother forces him to wash his hair with henna, a traditional Indian hair-dying technique.

In Anupam's story lies a glimpse of the aspirations of boys and girls in India today. Since phasing out government ownership of most industries and beginning to embrace free-market capitalism in 1991, India has built one of the world's fastest-growing economies. It is quickly becoming a global technology powerhouse, even as it continues to battle severe poverty at home.

More than half of India's 1.1 billion people are under 25, and for all but the most privileged, adolescence in this country can be a Darwinian contest. To be average, or even...