IIT Advanced: How Gunjan Kumar’s mother helped him crack IIT- Delhi when he was bed ridden with a lung disease just days before the exam |
Every JEE result season comes with its share of hero stories, be it toppers who studied eighteen hours a day, families who mortgaged everything for a coaching fee, students who overcame odds nobody expected them to.But this time, a story that has touched hearts is of a mother who became her son’s classmate and stood beside him when things fell apart. She quietly went back to being a student herself, not for her own degree, but for her son’s dream.She sat through online lectures, took notes the way any serious aspirant would, and did it all while her son lay in a hospital bed, unable to attend a single class of his own.
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A mother who became her son’s classmate and helped him crack IIT when he was struck with illness days before the JEE
Gunjan Kumar, from Sitamarhi in Bihar, had spent two years preparing for JEE in Kota when disaster struck just months before his exam. According to an India Today report, on 5 October 2025, a day after a routine test, he developed severe chest pain. Doctors diagnosed pneumothorax, a collapsed lung caused by lifting an unusually heavy object, and put him on complete bed rest for nearly three months, right through the final stretch of his preparation.
Then his mother stepped into his seat
Rather than let his preparation stall, his mother, Gunja, a homemaker with a BEd degree who had been living with him in Kota, took over. She played his recorded online lectures at home, sat through them exactly as he would have, and prepared detailed notes on each topic. Those notes eventually became part of his own revision material. As Gunja said to India Today, “My son’s dream is my dream.” She added that watching him fall ill left her anxious, but “we started watching the online lectures together, and I prepared notes for him,” and seeing those notes help him later “gave me immense happiness.“
Gunjan’s weak eyesight also could not hinder him from cracking IIT
Gunjan lives with over 70 percent vision loss and wears spectacles of 9.5 power, yet he still managed a 91.8 percentile in JEE Main. In JEE Advanced, he secured PWD OBC Category Rank 50 and Common PWD Rank 120, earning him a seat in Computer Science at IIT Delhi. His father, Rajnarayan Prasad, works as an engineer with the Border Roads Organisation, and his younger brother is currently preparing for JEE at the same institute in Kota.
He credits courage as much as knowledge
Speaking after his results, Gunjan said, “Circumstances are not always in our favour. Examinations test not only knowledge but also courage.” He added that he had decided to crack IIT-JEE and gave it everything he had, and that his mother’s support “proved invaluable” when he was unwell. He also credited his teachers, and urged other students to “always remain positive and keep looking ahead, no matter what challenges they face.“
