Meet 18-yr-old Sashi, Delhi’s first Adivasi girl to crack NEET under govt’s free coaching scheme

In 2018, Shashi did not have the courage to appear in the exam without coaching, she said. But that was the year of relief, as she enrolled in a renowned coaching centre in Delhi for NEET classes for free under the Jai Bhim Mukhyamantri Pratibha Vikas Yojana.

An 18-year-old Gond Adivasi girl has become the first candidate to crack the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) under a Delhi government scheme that allows students of scheduled caste and schedule tribes to avail classes at empanelled private coaching centres in the city for free.

Sashi cleared her Class 12 board exams in 2017 from a government school in northwest Delhi’s GTB Nagar, which is situated close to her residence. (Sourced/ HT Photo)

The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test is taken by students who wish to enrol in undergraduate medical and dental courses.

“I want to become an oncologist. I want my family and community to be proud of me,” said 18-year-old Shashi, daughter of a daily wage labourer, whose family had migrated to Delhi around 25 years ago from a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur.

But the going hasn’t been easy for Shashi. She had to brave through several hurdles. Affording coaching for NEET being the most prominent of them, she said.

She cleared her Class 12 board exams in 2017 from a government school in northwest Delhi’s GTB Nagar, which is situated close to her residence.

“In 2017, I prepared for NEET on my own but couldn’t clear the exam. The failure, however, taught me a lot of things. It was clear that students who attended coaching classes were better equipped for conceptual clarity, time management and dealing with uncertain questions,” said Shashi.

“But the fee in any renowned coaching centre is above Rs 1 lakh for the course, which my family could not afford, especially after demonetisation had wiped away all our savings,” said Shashi’s father Akhilesh Gaur, who is the sole breadwinner in a family of six — which includes himself, his wife, who is a housemaker, Shashi and three of her siblings.

The family belongs to the Gond community, whose population, according to the 2011 census, was pegged at around 11 million. The Gonds are largely spread over Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, followed by Maharashtra, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh. Delhi, according to a report of the union ministry of social justice and empowerment released in 2016, has a Gond Adivasi population of around 1,000, most of them migrants.

In 2018, Shashi did not have the courage to appear in the exam without coaching, she said. But that was the year of relief, as she enrolled in a renowned coaching centre in Delhi for NEET classes for free under the Jai Bhim Mukhyamantri Pratibha Vikas Yojana.

She appeared for NEET in May 2019 and earlier this month got enrolled for MBBS course in Delhi’s Lady Hardinge Medical College. She was part of a 107 candidates’ group selected under the scheme in 2018. So far, three candidates from the batch have been selected in premier engineering colleges, of which one candidate, whose father is a tailor by profession, made it into IIT-Delhi. He was felicitated by chief minister Arvind Kejriwal earlier this week.

Shashi, Delhi social welfare minister Rajendra Pal Gautam’s office said, is so far the first candidate to have cleared the NEET under the scheme.

In the scheme which took off in 2018, the government has empanelled private coaching centres in which selected candidates from schedules castes and scheduled tribes can avail classes for free and a fund of Rs 10,000 for books for competitive exams in the fields of medical, engineering and business management. Gautam’s office also organised a felicitation ceremony for Shashi at Delhi Secretariat on Thursday.

“While regular students could attend classes in the centre for 10-12 months, the ones under the scholarship get 4-6 months. For us, the challenge was tougher but I am prepared for more to come,” Shashi said.