/filters:format(webp)/english-betterindia/media/media_files/2026/05/19/1-2026-05-19-16-17-20.png?w=1024&resize=1024,1024&ssl=1 "How a Hyderabad Teacher Helped Watchmen’s Children Become Engineers From a Water Tank Classroom")
On a quiet lane in Miyapur, a fast-growing northwestern suburb of Hyderabad lined with gated apartment complexes and IT campuses, there is an unusual classroom — an overhead water tank, squat and cylindrical, gifted to a teacher who had simply run out of space.
Inside, and in the modest rooms built around it over the years, students bend over textbooks every evening while their parents guard the gates of the very buildings that tower above them.
This is where Akula Kalyani once studied. Her father worked as a security guard, and through the support system built inside this converted water tank in Miyapur, she completed engineering studies. Today, she earns Rs 20 lakh a year as a software engineer.
But she is not an outlier. By now, she is part of a pattern.
A teacher who could not look away
Pothukuchi Srinivas began teaching at a government school in Miyapur in the mid-1990s after a teacher asked him to help because there were only two teachers for 300 students. At the time, Srinivas was employed at a German company and would go to the school after finishing his shift to teach social studies.
It was there that something shifted in him. One day, a student had not completed his homework. When Srinivas asked why, the boy explained that he spent his evenings cleaning three tea carts after school and had no electricity at home to study.
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Srinivas began visiting students’ homes after that. What he found stayed with him. Most of the children came from families of watchmen, domestic workers and auto drivers.
“It is not the student’s fault; the system has failed them,” he says.
That realisation changed the course of his life. He quit his corporate job, began teaching children from his own home, and in 2003 founded the Pothukuchi Somasundara Social Welfare and Charitable Trust, named in memory of his father, a national award-winning teacher.
The trust was established in honour of the late P Somasundara Sastry, a recipient of the National Best Teacher Award. In many ways, what Srinivas built became both an institution and an inheritance.
From a water tank to a pipeline of engineers
As the number of students grew, Srinivas’s home could no longer accommodate them. In 2008, a local builder stepped in and offered an unused overhead water tank, which the trust converted into a classroom.
It soon became the unlikely symbol of the entire initiative: something discarded, repurposed, and transformed into a space that now holds something far more valuable than water.
Over the years, the trust built a deeply structured and long-term support system around that space. Since 2003, it has supported 1,531 students through school, helped produce nearly 900 diploma holders, and continues to mentor around 100 students at a time as they move from Class IX through diploma programmes, engineering education and eventually employment.
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The trust does not simply provide scholarships and step away. It covers college fees, university fees, semester fees, library fees, textbooks, notebooks, uniforms, transport and CRT coaching classes at the engineering level. At the earlier stage, it also supports polytechnic diploma costs.
For girl students attending evening classes, the trust additionally arranges transportation home.
“We take responsibility until they stand on their own,” Srinivas says.
And in this space, those words carry weight because standing independently is not assumed — it is carefully built.
The students who return to teach
One of the most striking aspects of the PSS Trust is what happens after students graduate. Many return.
Soumya, now in the second year of her BTech programme, is one such student. She joined the trust in Class IX, studied at a government polytechnic where she scored a 9.1 CGPA, and is now pursuing information technology engineering.
“The trust supported me with coaching, books, college fees and even a laptop,” she says.
Today, younger students in the same classroom point to her as their physics teacher.
Tanuj, a school student currently attending classes there, already has his future mapped out with remarkable clarity. He wants to pursue mechanical engineering, complete a BTech, and eventually join Indian Space Research Organisation to become a scientist like A. P. J. Abdul Kalam.
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He says it with the confidence of someone who has been taught that such a dream is possible.
That belief may be the PSS Trust’s most significant achievement. Not just engineering degrees or salary packages, but the expansion of what children believe they are allowed to aspire to.
When your father guards a gate and your classroom is a repurposed water tank, the distance to ISRO can feel impossible. Part of the trust’s work is making that distance feel measurable.
Why this model matters beyond Miyapur
The trust has grown from supporting just 24 students to becoming a system through which nearly 1,000 children now move, with centres extending beyond the original Miyapur classroom.
It has also drawn support from corporate organisations, including technology companies that increasingly see the trust’s alumni as a talent pipeline emerging from communities they may otherwise never have reached.
And the conditions that created the need for the PSS Trust are far from unique to Miyapur. Across Indian cities, as gated apartment complexes continue to expand, so too does the invisible workforce that sustains them — watchmen, housekeeping staff, drivers and domestic workers.
Their children often study in government schools, frequently without reliable electricity, internet access or private coaching. Many begin working part-time before they are even teenagers.
The infrastructure of aspiration — tutors, coaching centres, laptops and stable study environments — remains financially out of reach for most of them.
Which is why spaces like this matter.
When children like Tanuj say they want to work at ISRO, nobody in that classroom laughs or corrects them.
And perhaps that is the most important thing the PSS Trust has built — not just engineering degrees or salary packages, but a room where a watchman’s child can say his dream out loud and be taken seriously.