Arjun Malik

Arjun Malik was born in 2005 to a primary school teacher father and a ASHA worker mother. From Class 9, he knew he wanted to crack IIT — and he approached it like a military campaign. Studying in a government school in Badli with limited resources, he supplemented with free YouTube lectures and PDFs. He woke at 4 AM every day for 3 years — while his family slept in the same one-room home. When the JEE Advanced 2023 results came, Arjun had secured AIR 847 — the first student from Mundakhera, and one of the first from Badli block, to enter the IITs. He chose Computer Science at IIT Delhi. In his first year, he published a research paper on a machine learning model for crop disease detection using mobile phone photos — directly relevant to his village's agriculture problems. Arjun returns every summer to teach free math and science classes to Class 10-12 students in Mundakhera. 'IIT gave me a door,' he says, 'but my village gave me the reason to walk through it.'