From failing Class 11 to IIT Roorkee: Panipuri seller’s son shows why failure is never final

Harsh Gupta is nineteen and grew up in Kalyan, Maharashtra. This week he learned that he will start classes at IIT Roorkee after clearing JEE Advanced on his second try. The result has put him at the centre of an online wave of praise and curiosity.

A modest home and a big dream

Harsh lives with his parents, grandmother and two younger brothers in a two-room chawl. His father, Santosh Gupta, runs a roadside panipuri cart that covers basic bills but little more. Money for coaching and tests often came from small loans and emptied savings jars.

Health kept getting in the way

Class 11 was a disaster. Harsh failed because recurring rectal prolapse forced him to miss exams and spend days in hospital beds. The condition still flares up, but treatment and strict routines now keep it under control.

Learning about IIT after Class 10

Unlike many aspirants who target the exam from middle school, Harsh first heard the term “IIT” during the Covid lockdown. A teacher showed him videos about engineering campuses. Curiosity turned into a plan.

Kota, second chances and long hours

With his family’s backing, Harsh moved to Kota and joined Motion Education. Hostel walls and coaching timetables replaced home comforts. He studied up to twelve hours a day, cleared Class 12, and posted a 98.9 percentile in JEE Main.

His first shot at JEE Advanced fell short. He took a gap year, tried again, and secured an all-India rank near sixteen thousand, enough for IIT Roorkee.

Keeping critics at arm’s length

Relatives and classmates once joked that a street-food vendor’s son could never reach an IIT. Harsh stopped listening. He says the real pressure came only from himself and the thought of his father pushing that cart until midnight.

A message for other students

“Do not let a single failure write your story,” he told reporters after the results.

“Get help, rest if you are sick, then start again.” He adds that low-cost online lectures and public libraries filled many gaps when money for extra material ran out.

What happens next

Harsh has been allotted geotechnical engineering but hopes to slide into geophysical engineering in a later round. Long term he wants to sit for the civil-services exam and work on infrastructure projects in small towns like his own. For now the family is planning the long train ride to Roorkee and saving for a basic laptop. “I will keep the cart going,” Santosh Gupta said, “but my son will not push it.” Harsh’s journey is a reminder that steady effort can outlast illness, poverty and even an early failure stamp on a report card. The road was built one small step at a time, and it leads straight into an IIT classroom this August.