Khar teen tops NEET in state with AIR 7; Maha success rate rises 1.5%

MUMBAI: Shriniketh Ravi, with an all-India rank of 7, has emerged as the state topper in the NEET-UG results declared late on Tuesday. The National Testing Agency released a merit list of top 50 rankers in the country in the all-important test for admissions to medical and dental courses.
The success rate of students taking the test from Maharashtra has marginally increased to 47.8% from 46.3% last year.Three students from the state have made it to the merit list.
Maharashtra had the highest number of aspirants-almost 2.74 lakh-appearing for the test in the country, of whom 1.31 lakh qualified with a 50 percentile score. Last year, 1.13 lakh students had qualified in the state.
Khar resident Ravi, who attended Khar Education Society, was on vacation in Lonavala when the NEET results were declared. He will head to AIIMS, New Delhi, for his MBBS. "It was a tough journey but I had great teachers and friends. I was in love with science since my tenth grade, and I enjoy biology, so MBBS was a natural choice," he told TOI. While his parents are engineers and his elder sister a lawyer, he decided to listen to his heart's calling. "Covid too had an impact on him," said his father Ravi Santhanam. "He didn't attend school in 2020 because of the lockdown and passed out of Grade 10 in 2021. When he was at home, he would laud the doctors for being bold and stepping out to serve the ill while we are all indoors."
Shriniketh scored 715 out of 720 in the test with 99.99 percentile.
Tanishq Bhagat from Nagpur, with an AIR of 27, is the second topper from the state. Girl topper from the state, Riddhi Wajaringkar, who secured AIR 44, is from Baramati in Pune and comes from a family of doctors. Riddhi scored 710 and has bagged the eighth position in the country among girls. She said, "My parents are doctors and run a private clinic in my hometown while my uncle is also a medical professional. My obvious choice was the same field and I had started preparing for it soon after I passed school." Riddhi is aiming for a seat at AIIMS, Delhi, and did her entire preparation through the online course from Allen Kota. The third ranker in the SC category, with an AIR of 76, Ayush Ramteke, is from Maharashtra too.
Dr Vishal Panjabi, who coaches medical aspirants, said the cutoffs would go up marginally as more students have scored over 600. "It is difficult to say at the level of every state, but the paper was easy and there are clearly more high scorers this year than last," he said. This year, all students got bonus four marks for a question in physics that did not have a correct solution.