Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin on September 13 introduced a Bill in the assembly seeking exemption for the state from the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for admission to medical courses.
With the Bill, the government wants Tamil Nadu students to be kept out of the centralized exam and admission to medical courses to be based on Class 12 marks to “ensure social justice”.
The development came a day after 19-year old Dhanush, hailing from a village near Salem, died by suicide hours before he was to sit the NEET for the third time.
The issue is not new for Tamil Nadu, where NEET has been a sensitive subject. Several students from economically backward sections have allegedly died by suicide over the years after failing to clear the highly competitive test.
Background of NEET Exam
- A notification for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) was issued on December 21, 2010. The idea was to have a common entrance test instead of multiple exams, which was time-consuming and expensive for students. NEET was initially proposed to take place in 2012. Following the Medical Council of India (MCI), several states, including Tamil Nadu, opposed NEET.
- NEET was held for the first time on May 5, 2013, for both undergraduate and postgraduate medical courses.
- On July 18, 2013, the Supreme Court quashed NEET, saying MCI couldn’t conduct a unified examination and thrust it on governments.
- On April 11, 2016, a bigger five-judge bench of the court recalled the earlier verdict and allowed the Centre and the MCI to conduct the test until it decided afresh on its validity.
- Though Tamil Nadu was opposed to NEET from the beginning, the death by suicide of Shanmugam Anitha, a 17-year-old Dalit medical aspirant and daughter of daily-wage labour, pushed the issue centre stage. Anitha secured 1,176/1,200 in her state board exams but could not clear NEET.
- Over the year, at least 14 students have died by suicide due to NEET, say reports.
History behind NEET opposition in Tamil Nadu
Opposition against NEET is a long-standing issue in Tamil Nadu because of the belief that it favours students from a certain section of society and is against those who are from socially and economically backward classes.
It’s not just Tamil Nadu, however, that has had issues with NEET. States like Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka and Gujarat had also opposed NEET when it was first held in 2013.
The states at that time said that it will bring about huge changes in the syllabi and disrupt state-specific admission processes.
After all these years, Tamil Nadu is the only state that has continued its opposition.
Before NEET, admissions to medical colleges in Tamil Nadu were done in two ways — institute specific exams and admissions done on the basis of Class 12 marks, which is the school qualifying exam.
Social, Economic Impact of NEET
- Tamil Nadu had earlier set up a committee to study the social and economic impacts of NEET. The committee had found that students who get admissions to medical colleges based on NEET perform poorer than those who get admissions based on class 12 scores. The report also suggested that students from affluent families tend to score better in the exam.
Quota Offered by Central Govt for Socio-economic Benefit
- To ensure that students from across social and economic backgrounds stand a chance to become doctors, the government has also introduced reservations for EWS and OBC candidates. This is in addition to existing reservations for SC, ST candidates. In addition to 15% reservation offered to SC and 7.5% to ST category students, 27% seats will be reserved for OBC and 10% for EWS category students in medical admissions under All India Quota (AIQ).
Class 12 marks, not NEET
- In 2017, the AIADMK government tried to get Tamil Nadu exempted from the exams through an ordinance but didn’t get the President’s nod.
- Ahead of the 2020 assembly polls, the DMK promised a law to do away with the exam.
- On September 13, Stalin introduced a Bill in the assembly to do away with NEET. The state favours admission to medical courses based on Class 12 marks.
What does the Bill say?
The Bill seeks to provide admission to undergraduate courses in medicine, dentistry, Indian medicine, and homeopathy based on marks obtained in the qualifying examination, which is Class 12.
The Bill, referring to recommendations of a high level committee, said the government has decided to enact a law to dispense with the requirement of NEET for admission to UG Medical degree courses and to provide admission to such courses on the basis of marks obtained in the qualifying examination, through “Normalisation methods” in order to ensure “social justice, uphold equality and equal opportunity, protect all vulnerable student communities from being discriminated and bring them to the mainstream of medical and dental education and in turn to ensure a robust public health care across the state particularly the rural areas.”
Why Scrap NEET only and Not JEE?
- Many students also question why the state government wants to scrap the NEET while is not against JEE Mains which is a centralized entrance exam for engineering.
- The state government claims that the centralized, single-day exam puts pressure on students. Unlike engineering aspirants who have state and central level exams, for medical aspirants there is only one exam - NEET - for admission to both center and state level colleges.
Why Tamil Nadu Hates NEET
Not only are the young people in Tamil Nadu more likely to go to school, they are also more likely to stay in school.
The state has one of the lowest dropout rates from its schools. Further, Tamil Nadu enrolls 44.3% of those who finish high school into higher educational institutes.
That’s the highest gross enrolment ratio into higher education (GER) among all states in India, at twice the national average and about ten percentage points more than the global average.
In other words, at least half the population will have had a college education in Tamil Nadu, if this trend continues for a few more years.
It’s in this context that one needs to situate Anitha, a 17-year-old Dalit medical aspirant and a National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET) petitioner who recently committed suicide.
In most other states in India, she would not have completed school, if at all she got to go to a school in the first place. She was poor and from an obscure hamlet that very few of us can point to on a map.
That she had ambitions for medical school and would have made it into one, had the old system continued, is an achievement of Tamil Nadu’s education system. Tamil Nadu’s decision to broad-base its education instead of filtering through entrance exams at the gates of colleges is a conscious policy choice.
A global research suggests that standardized tests do not predict life outcomes but grades do. There’s also an ongoing discussion in countries such as the US on whether standardized tests like the SAT should be used at all in deciding college admissions.
Research indicates that school grades are a much better predictor of the personality, which in turn determines a student’s actual success. After all, what a standardized test ends up measuring is how socially advantaged a student is – given that access to coaching classes, preparation guides and the like have a massive influence on test scores.
In India, the idea of standardized tests being a measure of merit, however, is assumed to be axiomatic. More than measuring merit, entrance exams such as the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) have become symbols of pride.
It’s this perversion of the education system that Tamil Nadu seeks to avoid by using only class 12 grades as its criterion of admission.
Reference Articles
Why Tamil Nadu Hates NEET[1]
Why Tamil Nadu has brought in a Bill for exemption from NEET [2]
Why Does Tamil Nadu Want to Scrap NEET [3]
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