Back home to Bihar

"What we spend, we lose. What we keep will be left for others. What we give away will be ours forever.”

- David McGee

Born in 1979, he belongs to Mirdaul village in Forbesganj, Bihar. Amit Kumar Das comes from a humble and poor background; his father Moti Babu was a farmer and his mother, a housewife. He went to a government school in Supaul and Saharsa districts before completing his intermediate in science from A N College in Patna. Till 1997, he didn’t know a word of English. “I wanted to do something on my own. I wanted to be an engineer but my family could not afford that. So, I thought about the fishery. But I was told one needs at least Rs.25,000 to begin. Someone suggested I go to Delhi and try for a computer operator’s job. It would fetch me Rs.3,000 a month, I was told. My father was against it, but I pleaded with him.” He finally ran away from home to Delhi with Rs.250 in his pocket to study engineering. Once in Delhi, Amit realised that he could not afford an engineering degree. But he refused to give up.

His passion for computers took him to the office of a private computer training centre (NIIT). “There, I looked back blankly when the lady at the reception asked me, ‘When did you come?’ I couldn’t understand what she was saying. The lady told me that I needed to know English. I was refused admission,” Amit says. Seeing him so dejected on a DTC bus, a kind co-passenger asked him the reason, and advised him to join a spoken English course. “I joined the Delhi-based British School of Language for three months. On completion, I went back to NIIT and got admission to a six-month course. I topped the course and got a chance to do a three-year programme. I then took admission to a BA correspondence course. NIIT recruited me as faculty at Rs.500. By 2002, my salary had risen to Rs.1,500. I was offered an opportunity to go to England for a project but I declined,” says Amit, insisting “I wanted to do something on my own.”

He took a 10x10 feet space in Bharat Nagar, Delhi and started his own software company. For months there were no projects. “So, I used to teach Jamia Millia Islamia students till 8 pm and then make software till 3 am. Small projects began coming my way, and my first job (order) was worth Rs.5,000,” he says. Unable to afford laptops, Das would carry CPUs in public buses to show software to his clients. “I cleared the Microsoft professional examination. During this time, I developed and patented a software called ERSys” he says. Das opened his own firm from a cybercafé, with a few thousand rupees he had saved up. Today the firm has clients in 40 countries.

In 2006, Das attended a software fair in Australia. By 2008, he had shifted to Sydney to start his own company there. “In 2010, I participated in the Bihar NRI meet and got this idea to do something for Bihar. Today, I have 200 persons employed in my offices located in Dubai, London, Sydney, New Delhi and Patna,” Amit informs. The total turnover of ‘ISOFT’ is around Rs.150 crore.

Amit has successfully established the Sydney, Australia Chapter of the Bihar Foundation. He also went on to become the founder secretary of the Bihar Foundation. He is an Executive Member of AIBC (Australian Indian Business Council). At the age of 33, he is the youngest person to receive the “Bihar Asmita Samman” for his outstanding work and contribution.

After his father’s death in 2009, he started working on the MBIT (Moti Babu Institute of Technologies), named after his father Moti Lal, at Forbesganj in Araria district. “We have been able to rope in a number of national and international agencies to set up MBIT, a state-of-the-art institution having an academic alliance with the Technical and Further Education Commission,” Das says. The College is affiliated to Aryabhatta Knowledge University and has an initial intake capacity of 300 in five branches of Engineering.

Apart from MBIT, Amit wants to initiate projects that are worth several hundred crore rupees under his “Matrabhumi Project”. A world-class medical college and super speciality hospital at Forbesganj, an international residential school for the children of poor farmers at Mirdaul, another school of international standards at Forbesganj-these are a few among the projects that have already been initiated. These initiatives, while providing quality education and employment to the underprivileged, will also be helpful in improving the state’s image, which will in turn attract a larger number of NRIs to invest in Bihar. He intends to make India the most sought after talent hub of the 21st century, while focusing on research and development. “If any work is done with good intention, dedication, determination and with the blessings of elders, then it will always be successful no matter what!” says Das.