The Common Admission Test (CAT) results came out on Monday and with that came stories of perseverance and determination. Among them is the telling tale of twenty-two-year-old Nishant who topped CAT in Meerut with 98.7 percentile. The son of a small-time sugarcane farmer Parvindra Chaudhary, Nishant achieved the feat in his second attempt.
Nishant travelled 30kms every day from his Madhi village to reach his coaching institute in the city to prepare for the exams. He recalls how the journey was difficult. “I had to quit my job as a safety engineer at a textile mill to give all my time for CAT preparations. Many times there was no electricity in the village and studying became almost impossible. But all’s well that ends well,” he told Times of India.
Nishant completed his BTech from UP Textiles Technology Institute in Kanpur in 2016. Though he had expected a good score, an elated Nishant said he did not know that the results would be so good. He is now keeping his fingers crossed to get a call from IIMs.
Over 1.95 lakh candidates took CAT this year and twenty of them got the perfect score. While it was the male engineers who dominated the list of toppers this year too, no woman has managed to get the top slot. However, the number of people who secured the 100 percentile is the highest in the last six years.
CAT is the first step to get into the coveted Indian Institutes of Management and other top B-Schools in the country. On December 2016, 1.95 lakh candidates took the test, which was conducted in 138 cities in the country.
