A seven-and-a-half year old girl, the daughter of a daily labourer, created a record on Tuesday by becoming India’s youngest matriculate.
Sushma Verma, born in February 2000, cleared the Uttar Pradesh Board High School examination on Tuesday by securing 354 marks out of 600, missing a first division by a meagre six marks.
Verma, who secured 58 marks in Hindi, 60 in English, 66 in Maths, 63 in Science, 68 in Social Science and 39 in Computers, said she was happy for achieving the honour, but felt sad at the same time for failing to secure first division due to her poor performance in Computers.
The record for the youngest matriculate was held so far by Patna’s Tathagat Avatar Tulsi, who accomplished the feat when he was nine years of age.
She appeared in the board examination amid media attention, which had worried her school — St Meera’s inter college — that her attention might get diverted, but she “excelled in the examinations as expected,” school manager Vinod Kumar said.
Sushma had secured direct admission to Class IX last year, following permission given by the secondary education department. Before this she had studied at home.
Her father Tej Bahadur Verma, a daily wage labourer, and mother Chhaya, a housewife, are happy with the rare feat.
She is however, not the only such genius in her family. Her brother Shailendra had passed class 12th at the age of 11 and cleared the Scholastic Assessment Test and Test of English as a foreign language. He secured admission to a US university but could not go owing to monetary problems.