With anti-NEET (National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test) sentiments now spreading outside of southern states, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has pointed out that it was DMK who first opposed NEET, the nationalised test that aspirants to medical and dental courses must pass for entrance into both Under Graduate (UG) and Post Graduate (PG) levels.
In a statement, the CM said, “The DMK was the first to foresee the hazards of NEET and undertook a large-scale campaign against it. After coming to power, we constituted a high-level committee headed by Justice AK Rajan to study the impact of NEET-based admission processes. The Committee's report, based on extensive data analysis and inputs from students, parents, and the public, has been published and shared with various state governments to expose NEET's anti-poor and anti-social justice nature.”
Alongside a long statement, the CM also released the Justice AK Rajan Committee report from 2021 in eight languages. The AK Rajan report was, as mentioned, commissioned by the state government after the DMK came to power in 2021, in line with their poll promise to ban NEET in Tamil Nadu.
The AK Rajan report shows, exhaustively, how NEET fails students from Tamil medium schools and government schools, further disadvantaging students from poor backgrounds, while favouring the CBSE syllabus and students who can afford to pay the exorbitant costs for additional private tuitions. As a matter of fact, the report revealed that coaching centres had become a Rs 5750 crore industry in the state due to NEET. In an interview to TNM, retired Justice AK Rajan who led the committee, further pointed out how NEET can ultimately break down public health care systems in the state.
In the statement Stalin said, “As nationwide opposition to NEET grows due to the recent large-scale discrepancies, we are sharing the report of Justice AK Rajan Committee in English and all major Indian languages for everyone to better understand the ill-effects of NEET.” The report can be downloaded in English, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi and Bengali from links provided in Stalin’s post on X.
Stalin’s statement comes in response to recent news reports of question paper leaks and mass discrepancies in marking systems, including arbitrary grace marks awarded to students for ‘loss of time’. The discrepancies came to light on June 4, when the NEET results were announced leading to widespread outrage, forcing the National Testing Agency (NTA) director general Subodh Kumar Singh to announce that the Education Ministry will set up a panel to re-examine the results of over 1,563 students who were awarded grace marks. Multiple cases of reported question paper leaks have also surfaced. The Economics Offences Unit (EOU) of the Bihar police has now booked a total of ten medical aspirants apart from parents and other accused for buying NEET question papers ahead of the exam for a whopping Rs 30 to 50 lakhs.
Read: Explained: The allegations of scam surrounding NEET UG 2024
Other Opposition leaders including Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi and Akilesh Yadav have also voiced their concerns about the alleged scam. Protests conducted by the Indian Youth Congress are on-going in New Delhi, even hours ahead of Modi’s swearing in ceremony, calling for re-tests.
Meanwhile, the Tamil Nadu CM in his statement, also called attention to how the state government’s Bill to ban NEET in the state, is still pending with President Droupadi Murmu. In the wake of the AK Rajan report’s findings the Tamil Nadu Assembly, in 2021, unanimously passed a bill to ban NEET only for governor RN Ravi to withhold consent for months before returning the Bill to the Assembly for reconsideration.
In February 2022, the Assembly readopted the Bill without any amendments, making it only the second such an event had occurred in the Tamil Nadu Assembly in seventy years. The Bill was only forwarded to President Droupdi Murmu in May after multiple tussles between the DMK and Ravi. The Governor chose to delay the process, despite it being constitutionally mandated that he give his assent if a Bill is returned to him a second time without amendments and then pass it on to the President to sign. The Bill now, as pointed out by Stalin, is still pending with the President. In August last year, Stalin wrote to the President Murmu urging her to sign the Bill after the tragic suicides in Chennai of a father and a medical aspirant who failed NEET.
It may be recalled that the Union Government's decision in September last year, to reduce the NEET qualifying percentile to zero for PG aspirants also drew widespread criticism and concerns for the future of public health systems.