Tribal students from remote villages of Maharashtra's Gadchiroli and Melghat clear NEET

Tribal students, belonging to small farming families from remote villages of Gadchiroli and Melghat in Maharashtra, have cleared the recently conducted National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) 2021 and are soon expected to start undergraduate degree courses in medicine. Suraj Pungati (19), a resident of Nagargunda village in Bhamragad taluka of Gadchiroli, is happy to have surpassed his own expectations by scoring 378 out of 720 in NEET. Talking to PTI, the student claimed, he will be the first person from his taluka to attend a medical college. Pungati, the son of a farmer, said, there are over 60 families in his village where he is the first one to take up the science stream and is happy that he will now be pursuing medical education. The student, who belongs to ‘Mariya Gond’, a particularly vulnerable tribal group in the state, lost his mother four years ago and has a younger brother who is studying in Class 10. Pungati, who studied at a school in Nagpur, scored 92 percent marks in Class 10 board exams in 2019 and that’s when he decided to become a doctor. Another tribal student, Sawan Shilaskar (21), the son of a marginal farmer from a small village called Ghota in Dahrni taluka of Melghat region in Amaravati district, has scored 294 out of 720 in NEET. The journey for both the students was tough due to their limited means, but they got a ray of hope after they got to know about free coaching classes taken up by MBBS students and doctors in Pune through an NGO called Lift For Upliftment (LFU), founded by students and alumni of the B J Medical College there. The LFU operates for underprivileged and marginalised students, who do not have access to private coaching, its co-founder Dr Ketan Deshmukh, told.