Days after the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) caused a huge uproar in Tamil Nadu with regard to students being allotted exam centres outside the state, the controversy surrounding the issue is refusing to die down.
Slamming the test, the ruling party AIADMK’s mouthpiece Nammadhu Amma carried a poem in its latest issue questioning whether NEET was to make doctors out of students or mental health patients out of them.
The scathing poem addresses the contentious relationship NEET has had with Tamil Nadu. The state has advocated against the one-size-fits-all test that homogenizes students who fall under various various examination boards in the country.
In a reference to the ‘injustice’ done to the students of the state who have to work overtime to catch up with a different syllabus for the medical entrance test, the poem reads, "You need to bring the grains and I need to bring the pounder. In the plate called NEET, you and I can blow (the hot food) and eat. For you who brings the juice and me who brings the pulp, our rights are equal. Is that all?”
Presenting the struggle of the students, who, the poem goes on to say, “If you gave me some more time, I could study your lessons. Whatever I have learnt for years together, I will discard it entirely and I will study your lessons as I have no other go. All that is not possible. More than an insult to god, it will become an insult to the Supreme Court.”
Thousands of students from the state were inconvenienced on Sunday when the CBSE’s last-minute efforts failed and they were assigned to examination centres outside of the state. Krishnaswamy, a parent, who had accompanied his son to Ernakulam for the exam, suffered a cardiac arrest even as his son was taking his exam.
Many in the state had argued that Krishnaswamy’s death was due to the stress and inconvenience caused by travelling. Alluding to this, the poem asks, stereotyping other states, “Where do we write this exam? We all will write it in our towns. But you alone need to write it in places other than your hometowns. Some in camel herding Rajasthan. Some in Chetan's Kerala. Some in Sikkim, famous for its lottery. Leaving your city, you need to get ruined in different cities. Your fathers who came to help must be sent without life.”
On Wednesday, a Chennai-based NGO pointed out that the NEET's Tamil question paper has as many as 49 translation errors. The NGO, Tech For All, demanded that students be given grace marks for all the questions, blaming the CBSE for not standardising technical words for Tamil. They also complained that not one of the NCERT books from which the NEET syllabus is drawn were available in Tamil.
The ruling dispensation led by Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami and Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam have come under attack for not securing the ban on the examinations as had been promised by their predecessor, former CM J Jayalalithaa, during the 2016 legislative Assembly polls.
Concluding the satirical poem, the poet Chitharakupathan asks, “All that is okay. You, who are conducting a test with so much fairness and sincerity, is this to make us doctors or to turn us into mental disorder patients?"