With free coaching for NEET, underprivileged students learn to dream

At a time when coaching classes for NEET can set back the parents by as much as Rs 3 lakh, a group of doctors and medical students in Maharashtra are offering free coaching to students from poor families and rural areas.

The Lift for Upliftment (LFU) project, which began in 2015, has helped over a hundred students from poor families clear the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (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 B J 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 ten 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.

They tasted success immediately as six students from the batch of 36 cracked the CET or Common Entrance Test of the Maharashtra government for medical and engineering courses. Many of them got into good colleges.

In the NEET-2017, 11 students coached under the Lift for Upliftment project secured seats in medical colleges, Dhakane said.

"Some of them were from a very poor and marginalized background. One successful student, Vishal Bhosale, was from the Phase Pardhi community. He recently completed his internship after doing his MBBS from government college in Solapur," he added.