96.7%: city boy shows vision more important than sight

His score: 96.7 per cent.

“I couldn’t see clearly even with my glasses on but I knew it couldn’t be corrected. I accepted it; I knew I had to live with it,” he says. “After a while,I stopped trying to change it. With the results,I have proved that a disability can’t stop you from making it to the top.”

The Commerce student was the only visually impaired student in Pratibha Vikas Vidalaya,the government’s showcase school that has often found mention in the top 100-list and is modelled on the Kendriya Vidyalayas. He says though fellow students called him names in the beginning,he soon learned not to notice. Goel says he got support from all his teachers and friends — they often helped him with his work,encouraging him,sometimes even putting up a screen in front of him in multi-media classes so he could see.

When he was two,Goel’s mother Kusum Lata Goyal,an MCD school teacher,figured his eyesight was weak and the parents went to hospitals and private clinics,hoping for a cure. But when “no” was the answer everywhere,they decided to work with the odds. “I put him in my school in Keshavpuram so I could be with him,” she says. “Then he took the entrance for Pratibha Vidyalaya in Shalimar Bagh after Class V and stood first — there has been no looking back after that.”

As Goel gorges on sweets brought over by neighbours and relatives,he is already planning his future. He wants to join SRCC: “It was always a dream to top in Delhi,to prove that I could do it,and I have done it.”