GURUGRAM:
Anushka Panda
zooms across her room at the click of a switch attached to her wheelchair. The 14-year-old girl has been suffering from spinal muscular atrophy, a genetic disorder that affects motor nerve cells in the spinal cord and affects locomotion, but she hasn’t let it hamper her studies.
On Tuesday, Panda topped the Class 10 CBSE board examination in the specially-abled category, along with
Sanya Gandhi
of Ghaziabad’s
Uttam School
. A student of Suncity School, Sector 54, Gurugram, she scored 97.8%. TOI spoke to a jubilant Panda at her residence in Sector 67. “I screamed my lungs out when I saw my results,” she said. “I like science more than humanities because it involves more practicals than theory. My condition has not limited me in any way, except that I need assistance to change my postures.”
Panda loves playing chess as a leisure activity and aspires to become a software engineer. She can speak as many as six different languages. “I studied for 2-3 hours daily,” she said. “I could not have topped the exam, had I not have received tremendous support from my family and school.”
Her father,
Anup Panda
, said he was extremely proud of his daughter. “The challenges she faced were huge but she has pulled this off like any other good student. She didn’t let anything come in the way of her ambitions,” he said, adding, “She suffers from physical weakness and was allowed to take 30 minutes more to finish her paper but she would finish by the time the other students did.”He said she was only one-year-old when doctors diagnosed her with spinal muscular atrophy, adding, “Her mother and I were always there to assist her. We wanted her to set an example and she did.”
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