Lecturer moonlights as porter to help poor kids | India News

BERHAMPUR: If there’s someone shining the light through moonlighting, look no further than Ch Nageshu Patro of Odisha’s Ganjam district. The 31-year-old is a guest lecturer at a private college by day and a porter at the railway station by night. In between, he finds time to teach poor students at a coaching centre he himself set up.
Patro has been working as a registered porter since 2011, but his life changed after the Covid outbreak. “Most trains stopped running and I lost my livelihood. Instead of sitting idle, I started teaching students of Class X,” says Patro, a postgraduate in Odia.
Later, he opened a coaching centre for classes VIII to XII, where mostly poor kids come. “Whatever I earn as a porter is mostly spent on paying four teachers at the coaching centre,” he says.
At the centre, Patro teaches Hindi and Odia and has hired teachers for other subjects. He earns Rs 10,000 to Rs 12,000 a month working as a porter and pays his teachers between Rs 2,000 and Rs 3,000 each. He earns around Rs 8,000 a month from the college — Rs 200 for each class as guest lecturer and can take a maximum of seven classes a week.
Patro lives with his father Ch Rama Patro, 65, and mother Kari, 58, at Manohar village near Berhampur. His parents are small-time goat and sheep farmers.
He wants to continue teaching because he loves the profession and wants poor students to do well. “I could not appear in the high school examination in 2006 as a regular candidate because my parents were unable to pay for my education. I was compelled to go to Surat in Gujarat in search of a job,” he says.
After working in a textile mill in Surat for about two years, an illness forced him to return home. He then went to Hyderabad to work as a salesman in a mall. While staying in Hyderabad, he got work as a railway porter in December 2011.
He decided to appear for the Class XII exam in 2012 through correspondence. After passing the HSC exam, he did his graduation and post-graduation from Berhampur University as a regular student, all this while working as a porter at night.