Indore: With 720 out of 720 marks, 18-year-old Soyeb Aftab of Odisha and Akanksha Singh of Delhi have hit bullseye in this year's NEET, topping the coveted exam for admission to undergraduate medical courses.
The National Testing Agency (NTA) declared results on October 16 of both phases of National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) the first and main held in September and the other on October 12.
Though both Soyeb and Akanksha have scored 720 marks, the Odisha lad bagged AIR 1 while the Delhi girl managed AIR 2.
This year, the NEET cut off scores for unreserved and EWS category has surged to 720-147. The NEET cut off 2020 for Scheduled Castes (SC), Scheduled Tribes (ST) and Other Backward Classes (OBC) is 146-113 and for the PWD candidates of unreserved and EWS candidates has been set 146-129 in NEET result 2020.
Over 15.97 lakh students had registered for the exam.
City’s top five
The city’s toppers in terms of highest numbers and ranks are Raghav Upadhyay who scored 680 and bagged AIR 675, Om Kashyap (AIR 678), Bhairish Mandlecha (778) Asha Choudhary (785), and Yash Tiwari (885).
Both students of Allen Career Institute made hay at the NEET as national and city topper cemented their foundation from here. National topper Soyeb studied in Kota while city topper Raghav Upadhyay studied here in the institute’s branch.
Soyeb, son of a businessman and a homemaker, is the first in his family who would be joining a medical college.
“I had a dream to become a doctor. I came to know about Tallentex – the scholarship program of Allen, which is at par with NEET level. I put in all my efforts and joined Allen’s Kota classroom in 2018. With the guidance of teachers, I got success,” Soyeb said.
He also added that he didn’t go home for 2.5 years and even remained in Kota even during the lockdown. “I want to become a cardiologist and find out ways of treatment for heart-related ailments which are still incurable,” Soyeb said.
I didn’t let lockdown affect my studies: Raghav
Even after being the city topper, Raghav Manish Upadhyay, was disappointed with his rank as it was not what he had expected. “I knew that the cut off would be high but I expected my ranking under 200-300,” he said.
Raghav said he was expecting to get AIIMS-Raipur or Jodhpur and will target for the same. “I will go for colleges in Maharashtra if I fail to get any college of my choice,” he added.
Born in a middle class family, Raghav as a team member brought laurels for the city when his team won the Jet Toy Competition at A world In Motion (AWIM) National Olympics 2013 held in Bengaluru. For the first time, any student of MP had won this prestigious competition, under which students prepared a paper car run by air, which can run as good as a real car and demonstrated before the jury of international level automobile experts.
It was Raghav’s pertinacity to take biology as his subject and his objective is to become the best neurosurgeon and serve people, while his father is a journalist, his mother, Raksha upadhyay, is an electronics and telecommunication engineer and Associate Professor in a college. Raghav believes that success needs hard work and there is no alternative to it.
