Underprivileged Indian students compete for a place on a life-changing scheme to get into a prestigious IT academy.

Getting into the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) is even harder than Harvard or Oxbridge: about 60 hopefuls apply for each place. And you can see why; it produces more millionaires than any other educational institution.

But this film isn't the story of IIT, it's about the vision of two remarkable men who set up a school called the Ramanujan School of Mathematics in India's poorest state, Bihar.

The two men are Anand Kumar, a mathematician, and Abhayanand, a senior police officer. These unlikely visionaries share the belief that poverty, caste and religion should be no barrier to opportunity.

Ten years ago Al Jazeera travelled to Bihar to follow the class of 2007, from the initial selection from over 3,000 hopefuls through to the moment when the chosen Super 30 got their final results which students would go on to IIT and the potential of a top-flight career in information technology.

Now, 10 years on, we revisit the Super 30 series and return to Bihar to discover what has become of this innovative project and the successful students from the class of 2007.

In the first episode, First Step on the Ladder, over 4,000 students converge on Patna for the first-round exam to select the shortlist of 200. The stakes are high and the students know there's no second chance. Their entire future could be determined in the course of an afternoon.

Source: Al Jazeera