Student Angel Gavit explains her 400 km long exhausting journey to reach NEET examination centre

In her aspiration to crack NEET, the medical entrance examination, Angel Gavit, 17, a student from Navapur taluka in Nandurbar undertook a 400 km long journey to the exam centre in Kandivali on Sunday.

In her aspiration to crack NEET, the medical entrance examination, Angel Gavit, 17, a student from Navapur taluka in Nandurbar undertook a 400 km long journey to the exam centre in Kandivali on Sunday. She started her journey by road at 9 pm on Saturday with her sister and friend on a private vehicle which the family had hired for Rs 13,000. On reaching her uncle’s place in Thane at 4 pm Angel made another two-hour journey from to Borivali on an ST bus and then in an auto from Borivali to Kandivali. “The journey was exhausting, but I am prepared and not tense,” Angel told Mirror outside Thakur College in Kandivali, the centre allotted to her.

With the centre’s decision to conduct NEET amid the pandemic after the Supreme Court dismissed the pleas to postpone the examination, reports from various quarters suggested a hard time that the students had to face fulfil their ambitions.

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There were other candidates who had to come from far-off places such as Nashik and Dahanu at the Thakur College centre, which was among the largest centres in the city with 1,200 candidates. “Our college is a NEET centre for the first time. The NTA officials checked our infrastructure and allotted us the strength of three centres,” said principal Dr C T Chakraborty.

There was also a huge rush outside colleges on Sunday morning with a large number of candidates arriving along with their parents. Social distancing guidelines were imposed in the centres, with 12 students per classroom and also provided disposable masks, sanitisers and stationery. “We sat one student on every third bench and that too in a zig-zag manner. A separate room was reserved for symptomatic students. We had one student with a high temperature and he sat in the isolated room,” Dr Chakraborty said.

Meanwhile, there was also some confusion among parents and candidates at Sion’s Padmabhushan Vasantdada Patil Pratishthan’s College of Engineering, as the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducts NEET, had mistakenly cited the address as Navi Mumbai. On September 10, NTA changed the centre of candidates from the Nirmala Niketan College in Churchgate to Vasantdada Patil College.

“The NTA gave the correct Mumbai pin code, but said Navi Mumbai instead, which led to confusion. Thankfully, I had realized the error in time and wrote to NTA to make a correction,” said a parent from Bhayandar, Dr Suwas Darvekar.