Shantilal Kasdekar, a 19-year-old tribal from Dharni taluka of Amravati district, has cleared NEET with 427 marks. He managed it with help from the state tribal department and Pune NGO Lift for Upliftment. After MBBS, Kasdekar plans to serve the people in the remote pockets of Melghat
While his father and elder brothers were toiling away in the mid-October humid heat at their daily-wage job, 19-year-old Shantilal Kasdekar received the news which was virtually their ticket out of abject poverty. Having scored 427 in NEET, this tribal boy from a remote village of Amravati district’s tribal belt of Melghat, is now more or less assured of an MBBS seat in a government college.
Kasdekar is the result of a unique experiment which started in 2017 in the impoverished Melghat region, under the aegis of state’s integrated tribal development project (ITDP) and Pune-based NGO Lift for Upliftment (LFU), which provides free medical coaching.
To fully fathom the experiment’s success, it is crucial to see it from Kasdekar’s eyes. When he was barely two years old, due to some issues, the Kasdekars had to abandon their meagre landholding in his birthplace of Duni village in Dharni taluka, about 300 kms from Nagpur. “We shifted to a nearby village where my father worked at the farm of a money lender. My two elder brothers also dropped out of school at various stages and took to daily wage jobs,” recalls Kasdekar.
Fortunately, his maternal uncle stepped in to help the beleaguered family. “We shifted to his village Zaphal, in the same taluka, and have lived there since. He gave us access to a small patch of land which we till, apart from picking up any daily wage job,” said Kasdekar. Despite three ‘earning’ members, the family could never rake in more than Rs40,000 per year.
At his uncle’s insistence, the young Kasdekar was enrolled at a residential ashramshala in the nearby village of Tembli. His education right from Std 1 happened there, but the turning point came when Kasdekar was enrolled in Std XI and Dr Vijay Rathod came to Dharni as the ITDP project officer.
Being an MBBS graduate, Dr Rathod decided to prepare tribal students for NEET. And that’s how Pune-based LFU got involved to help in coaching these selected kids.
Its founder-president Dr Atul Dhakne said, “Dr Rathod was my senior in college and on his request, we decided to take up this unique challenge. Our faculty comes from a pool of volunteers who are both MBBS students and practicing doctors.”
Every weekend, LFU volunteers undertook the 14-hour journey from Pune to Melghat and coached kids. “Classes ran for 12 hours each on both days with volunteer Dr Santosh Chate coordinating the logistics,” said Dr Dhakhne. Since tribal kids came from a predominantly Marathi medium education, LFU focused on concept clarity while working on language skills as well, with ashramshala teachers, too, pitching in.
But the NEET 2019 results were not as per expectations, both for LFU and the tribal department. Kasdekar qualified for a bachelor of medical science (BMS), but he wanted MBBS. All stakeholders decided to give it one more push and Kasdekar re-enrolled to crack NEET 2020.
It was felt that students needed more academic interaction than just the weekend classes and so, a move to Pune was inevitable. That’s when the then principal secretary of state tribal development department Manisha Verma stepped in to help with the logistics. Verma said, “Our job is to provide a conducive ecosystem to these tribal children because they have tremendous potential. We had a hostel around 70-odd kms from Pune city, and that was readied. For the LFU faculty, the commute of 14 hours was now drastically reduced.” Following Verma’s intervention, over 30 tribal kids shifted to Pune in November 2019.
While the new coaching schedule gained traction, another hurdle cropped up due to Covid-19. A hostel in Pune district had to close down due to lockdown and in May, the kids were back on a special bus to Amravati.
Though Dr Rathod, who initiated the project had been transferred, the educational experiment was in safe hands in Dharni. Project officer Dr Mittali Sethi ensured that all the kids were accommodated at a hostel near her office. Right from coolers to facilities for online classes to tests series material were provided at the hostel.
Sudhir Chavhan, a tribal department official, who stayed put with the kids in the hostel from May till September end said, “The determination on their faces gave us encouragement to carry on.”
While LFU faculty joined through Zoom platform, the offline faculty included Dr Sethi herself. “I was an associate professor at a medical college before joining the civil services,” said Dr Sethi, who doubled up as their biology teacher. Since her probation tenure was also in Melghat, it was not difficult for Dr Sethi to connect with the local students.
Out of the batch of 34, total 10 students qualified NEET. Dr Sethi said, “Seven among them are guaranteed an MBBS seat.”
The NEET results on October 16 were not just a landmark for Kasdekar, but also for the unique partnership between the tribal department and LFU.
But their biggest reward is how Kasdekar sums it all up. “After my MBBS, I will be back in Melghat to serve my people. They need doctors more than anyone else,” he says.