How do you define Bihar? A land of corruption, one where key discrimination persists in the rural areas between the Brahmins and other classes and where women are still discouraged to take up jobs and made to live in homes? Biased view. Utterly biased view.
Here’s how you define Bihar appropriately.
An unsung hero of a state where students make their parents proud, nearly every day of their academic learning day and where nine in ten students excel in Math and attain sky-rocketing success in entrance examinations for Medical and Engineering.
Much like most other previous years, this year too, Bihar’s students have garnered an excellent result where examinations like NEET stand; the standard-bearer for excellence for applying for medical and engineering pursuits. And truth be told, if there were a state that presented an excellent example of just what is meant by women-power, breaking the glass-ceiling where the performance of girl students vis-a-vis boy stand then few others would be able to match Bihar.
Topping the 2018 NEET exams, Bihar’s Kalpana Kumari has secured an outstanding, rather unbelievable percentile score of 99.99 per cent, which is about 691 marks. Can you dig that? What on earth must have the girl done, how hard and arduous must have been her preparations that she scored only .1 per cent shy of a full 100 percentile score?
With 691 marks, Kalpana Kumari is right on top of the scoresheets of the prestigious NEET exams. Only Telangana’s Rohan Purohit and Delhi’s Himanshu Sharma jointly bagged the second position in the said examination, scoring 690 marks, this is just 1 point shy of the remarkable 691 earned by the earnest Bihar girl.
But that is not all. What makes the outstanding achievement of Bihar’s Kalpana Kumari akin to scaling the tallest summit there really is in the realm of academic excellence is that her triumph came against the backdrop of 13.36 lakh students, who registered for the examination across India. At a stage where students often go to endless lengths in securing the best grades possible to scale the most important zenith of their lives- the academic pursuits after school life- Bihar’s students have often transformed grades secured on mark sheets into emeralds and diamonds.
When compared to the last year, as many as 16.49 per cent more students registered for the challenging NEET examination. And therefore, in this light, the achievement of Bihar’s Kalpana Kumari is even more special and outstanding. Whether you asked the topper student or any other student regarding the importance of not only clearing but securing great grades in the said examination, you’d receive, in all, likelihood a universally accepted reply.
That, NEET is conducted by the eminent CBSE not only for admission into the MBBS but also for BDS courses in colleges that are run with the approval of the Medical Council of India- MCI- as well as the Dental Council of India, the DCI. These, indeed are, among the premier career directions that many students vie for. Students in India are constantly bidding for a contention into medical and engineering directions- among the two acerbically-demanding albeit rewarding spheres. And each year, where on the one hand, students observe some sterling results, finding their dreams turning into realities, on the other hand, there are also some hundreds of thousands of those, who suffer from miserable failures.
In these dividing lines between success and failure- are those who truly realise their dreams. And that said, what one has to celebrate above anything else is that in a country where one competes for a seat in medical or in an engineering college against a few thousands of others, a girl topping the result in the entire country, let alone Bihar is an achievement few others can match and a great victory that needs to be cherished.