A group of doctors and medical students in Maharashtra are providing free coaching to students from poor families and rural areas to prepare for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET).
Let’s know about this coaching. The Lift for Upliftment (LFU) project, which started in 2015, has helped over 100 students from poor families clear the All India Pre Medical Entrance Examination for NEET, MBBS and other courses.
Dr. Atul Dhakane started the project with 10 to 15 medical students. He said, “This is in the year 20215, when I was in third year of MBBS at BJ Medical College in Pune, I used to teach biology in a coaching class under the scheme of earning and learning. There, I realized that the huge fees. Because of this, students from poor backgrounds and people coming from rural, tribal and drought-prone areas cannot afford coaching,”
Read here- NEET PG Counseling 2022: What will be the delay in NEET PG counseling? Students upset, get these documents ready
“Initially, we found out about students from rural areas who wanted to pursue medical education and started mentoring them in a small class at a school run by the Pune Municipal Corporation,” he said.
Let us tell you, 6 students of 36 batches cracked the Maharashtra Government’s Common Entrance Test (CET) for medical and engineering courses. Many of them got enrolled in good colleges. According to Dr Atul, the top NEET coaching classes in cities like Pune and Mumbai charge up to Rs 3 lakh. LFU provides free coaching. Every year 60 students enroll for LFU coaching. At least 48 LFU students took the NEET exam in July 2022.
After Pune, LFU spread over 600 km from Mumbai to the tribal Melghat region of East Maharashtra, where another learning program was started but they did not get the desired result from Melghat batch in NEET 2019. Dr Atul said, “The atmosphere there was not conducive for exam preparation. So we shifted the students to Pune next year, and 16 students cleared NEET and 8 of them got admission in government medical colleges”
In the year 2020 NEET, out of 46 LFU students, 26 were successful in 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. 70 out of 130 joined MBBS courses while the rest did courses like BAMS, BDS and BHMS.
Apart from poverty, the students of Melghat also face a language. Some students of the Korku tribe, let alone English, are not even familiar with Marathi.
Dr. Santosh Chate, who is currently doing his internship at Cooper Hospital, Mumbai, took NEET coaching from LFU. In the year 2017, he passed the NEET exam. Dr. Santosh said, “I dreamed of becoming a doctor. After completing class 10th, I came to LFU and joined their program for NEET. This initiative is a boon for medical aspirants from rural areas and underprivileged sections. Is,”
