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Underprivileged students learn to dream big with free NEET coaching
A group of doctors and medical students in Maharashtra are offering free coaching to students from poor families and rural areas to prepare them for National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET), for which private coaching classes are a costly affair
A group of doctors and medical students in Maharashtra are offering free coaching to students from poor families and rural areas to prepare them for National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET), for which private coaching classes are a costly affair.
The Lift for Upliftment (LFU) project, which began in 2015, has helped over a hundred students from poor families clear NEET, an all-India pre-medical entrance test for MBBS and other courses.
“Back in 2015, when I was in the third year of my MBBS at BJ Medical College in Pune, I used to teach biology at a coaching class as part of an earning and learning scheme. There, I realised that because of hefty fees, students from poor backgrounds and those coming from rural, tribal and drought-prone regions cannot afford coaching,” said Dr Atul Dhakane, who started the project along with 10 to 15 like-minded medical students.
“Initially, we started tapping students from rural areas who wanted to pursue medical education and started giving guidance to them in a small classroom of a Pune Municipal Corporation-run school,” he said.
Six students from the batch of 36 cracked the Common Entrance Test (CET) of the Maharashtra government for medical and engineering courses. Many of them got into good colleges.
According to Dr Dhakane, top NEET coaching classes in cities like Pune and Mumbai charge as much as ₹3 lakh. LFU offers coaching free. Every year, 60 students enrol for LFU coaching. As many as 48 LFU students took NEET in July 2022.
After Pune, LFU branched out to the tribal Melghat area of eastern Maharashtra, over 600 km from Mumbai, where another tutoring program was started, but they didn’t get the desired results from the Melghat batch in NEET 2019.
“The atmosphere there was not conducive for preparing for the exam. So we shifted students to Pune next year, and 16 students cracked NEET and eight of them secured admission in government medical colleges,” he said.
In 2020 NEET, of 46 LFU students, 26 managed to crack the exam. The Ulgulan initiative has now been extended to Osmanabad in Marathwada where accommodation facilities are provided.
“Since 2016, we have provided coaching to 250 students and 130 of them have become, or are becoming, doctors. Of 130, 70 joined the MBBS course while the remaining pursued courses such as BAMS, BDS and BHMS,” Dhakane said.
Besides poverty, an additional hurdle that students from Melghat face is language. Some students from the Korku tribe are not familiar even with Marathi, let alone English.
Dr Santosh Chate, who is currently doing his internship at Cooper Hospital in Mumbai, is another LFU success story. He cleared NEET in 2017.
“I dreamed of becoming a doctor. After completing Class 10, I came across LFU and joined their tutoring programme for NEET. This initiative is a boon for medical aspirants from rural areas and underprivileged classes,” Chate said.
(With agency inputs)
