Achiever : Tripura's Arunima Jamatya
By D.Sekharan

With a placid face and quiet demeanour she radiates brilliance which shines forth whenever she effusively speaks of her favourite subjects, mathematics and image processing. A top-grade technocrat from the country's elite IIT Kharagpur with two lucrative job offers under her kitty Ms Arunima Jamatya (23) is back home on a long-awaited monthlong holiday at Agartala.
At a time when drop-out rate among tribal school students in Tripura is as high as 85% and success rate in Madhyamik and Higher Secondary examinations conducted by Tripura Board of Secondary Education (TBSE) well below thirty percent Arunima's outstanding career graph proves quite a few points. How could she beomce the state's first tribal student to achieve so much-standing 7th in both the Madhyamik and Higher Secondary examinations of TBSE , securing admisstion to IIT and then obtaining a top-grade M-tech in electronics and electrical communication engineering and computer vision ?

Sitting quietly in the official quarter of her father Mr Amrit Sadhan Jamatya , superintendent of Agartala Central jail, Arunima says with perfect equanimity on her face 'my mother Ms Taru Debbarma (Jamatya) is a school teacher who inspired me first and then I was also encouraged by the good academic performances of my elder brother Anupam Jamatya who is now a lucturer in computer engineering in polytechnic institute and my elder sister Anupama Jamatya who is a lucturer in Tripura Engineering College. In fact I always tried to emulate and even better them'. Arunima's proud  father Mr Amrit Sadhan jamatya was always a source of inspiration and wanted his children to shine in the academic arena. 'One reason why my father is yet to make a house of our own at Agartala is the huge expenses he incurred in giving us proper education' Arunima said .

However , Arunima is an exception to the ordinary tribal children in the insurgency-ridden hilly interiors as she had her entire schooling at Agartala. Her father Mr Amrit Sadhan Jamatya actually hails from remote and backward Nagrai village under Ampi police station of south Tripura . Arunima has only faint memories of her childhood visits to the ancestral village home with parents . 'I can recall that it was a very quiet and very backward village without even electricity and my father and elders listening to songs and news-bulletins in a radio. People had very little requirements and they were happy' Arunima said . The lone odd link in her memory of the village home is that she had to trek a few kms and cross a rivulet on foot before reaching the Nagrai village. This childhood memory has all but faded from her mind because of the distance in time and space .

Born on november 17 1980, exactly five months after the ethnic riots involving tribals and non-tribals in Tripura , Arunima started showing flashes of her brilliance even in her two year pre-primary study in Ramkrishna Mission school in Dhaleshwar area of Agartala and then in state's premier school Netaji Subhash Vidyaniketan. She became the first tribal student of Tripura ever to figure in the merit list of TBSE in the Madhyamik examination of 1997 where she had stood 7th . She retained the poisition in the higher secondary examination two years later with an extra feather in her cap-gold medal for obtaining more than ninety five percent marks in mathematics. Her passage into the rarefied environs of the elite Kharagpur IIT in 1999 itself through the national level joint entrance examination was also as effortless as her earlier successes had been . She savours the memory of studies in IIT saying ‘the atmosphere is such that you are imbued with a passion for study and excellence ‘.  

Securing top gradings she acquired M-tech degree last month and along with it two lucrative job offers from premier private companies through campus interview.

Arunima is still undecided on joining service as she still retains her quest for knowledge and academic excellence . 'I have one month's time before I am called upon to accept either of the two offers from companies in Kolkata and Bangalore but I am also planning to go for a management degree from one of the premier institutions'Arunima said . Despite becoming a top order  technocrat Arunima is still deeply attached to the academic arena of pure science . The most memorable day in her life is not one related to any personal achievement or bliss but any solar eclipse day.' The sheer joy of viewing the dynamic forces of nature through the solar eclipse , specially the diamond ring overpowers me' she said , adding that she has not  missed viewing a solar eclipse over the past half a decade.

Arunima is also blissfully oblivious of the ethnic problems in Tripura and reluctant even to recognize it as a problem .To a question whether she faced any problem as a tribal student

in non-tirbal dominated schools of Agartala she emphatically says 'in my whole life I have never faced any such problem and for me it simply does not exist; these things are creations of our elders but we the younger generation think differently'. A self-made achiever in her own right Arunima has a few words of advice for students of Truipura : 'think beyond time and space , be competitive and self-reliant and always avoid being spoon-fed'.