The people who run it

Dr. M. Karunanithi was born on 20 November 1952 into a farming family at Elayampalayam, a hamlet near Tiruchengode. He went to the local school, then to Madurai Medical College to study pharmacy, and spent his first five working years as a chemist at a private medical company in Namakkal.

Growing up in a village, he saw how little schooling the women around him were given, and how much of what happened to them followed from that. He decided the answer was to educate them. Raising the money took years. He started a cattle feed manufacturing unit in his hamlet and made it work, and that paid for the first college.

Swamy Vivekanandha College of Pharmacy opened in 1992 under the Angammal Educational Trust, named after the philosopher who had argued for educating women. Colleges in arts and science, engineering, education, pharmacy, nursing, physiotherapy, allied health, dentistry and medicine followed. Vivekanandha Vidhya Bhavan was added when local families asked for a school.

Thirty-four years later there are 27 institutions and about 3,000 people working in them. More than 1.5 lakh students have been taught here, most of them the first woman in their family to hold a degree.