– Mita Mukherjee

Over 500 students from Al- Ameen Mission coaching centres, run by a NGO in West Bengal, have qualified the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) 2020, an official of the mission said.

Nearly 150 of the 504 successful candidates “are very poor or come from families belonging to the below poverty level (BPL) category”, M. Nurul Islam, general secretary and the founder of the 33-year old NGO told EducationWorld on Friday.

The 150 odd students were offered the coaching “almost free or at a  nominal charge,” he said.

Jisan Hussain who has scored 675 out of 750, the highest among the 504 students is the only son of a “poor farmer” of Dadpur village in North 24 Parganas district in West Bengal.

The boy’s father suffers from partial vision impairment but toils eight to ten hours a day in the fields to earn barely Rs 5000 a month, Jisan said.

 “We are quite poor. But I want to become a neurologist. I have a special interest in this field of medical treatment. I have been able to crack the NEET because of the help that I got from the mission and my teachers,” Jisan told EducationWorld.   

Nearly 1900 students from six centres across Bengal run by the Mission had appeared in NEET 2020.

Islam said the Mission started its journey in 1987 with the opening of a small school in a far way village in Howrah district. The main aim was to offer education to bright and meritorious students coming from poor and low income group families, particularly from the rural belts of Bengal.

 “The success rate of our Mission students in the medical entrance test had always been very high ever since we started offering the coaching to medical aspirants. But, this is the first time more than 500 students have cracked the test,” Islam said.     

He said going by the last year’s cut-off trend all the 504 students are expected to manage a seat in the MBBS or BDS course.

The mission has produced nearly 6000 doctors in the last 20 years years, Dildar Hossain, director of Al-Ameen Mission Study Circle said.

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