CM Opposes NEET For AHCs

Chennai: Stating that admission modalities for AHCs (Allied and Health Care professions) should remain within the jurisdiction of State Governments, Chief Minister M K Stalin demanded the immediate withdrawal of the new diktat of the National Commission for Allied and Health Care Professions (NCAHP) making NEET mandatory for the undergraduate degree courses, Bachelor of Physiotherapy (BPT) and Bachelor of Occupational Therapy (BOT), from the ensuing academic year.

In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday, Stalin sought his personal intervention in making NCAHP drop the move that would have multiple deleterious consequences and pointed out that Tamil Nadu had been steadfastly opposing NEET for MBBS admissions and had all along been cautioning about the dangers of it being extended to other courses.

Unfortunately, our worst apprehensions had come true, he said, adding that it was evident from the recent communications from the Union Health Ministry that NEET was being prescribed for two courses as the first step of a larger plan to make it mandatory for all AHCs in future. This attempt, being made without due consultations with the State Governments, who were constitutionally in charge of both Health and Education sectors, was totally unacceptable, he said.

‘As we had pointed out earlier, the introduction of NEET for MBBS admissions has forced 1.4 lakh students to avail costly coaching and appear in the NEET examination to compete for 12,000 seats,’ he said, adding that it had created unnecessary costs, stress and anxiety for the families and had rendered the performance in school examinations redundant.

Extending the flawed model to a larger canvas of AHCs would further aggravate the situation since lakhs of students who aspired for the over 50,000 seats in Tamil Nadu were from much poorer socio-economic backgrounds when compared to the MBBS aspirants. Forcing these poor families to spend on NEET coaching would be a gross injustice, the Chief Minister said.

Prescribing a mere appearance in NEET as a qualification was devoid of logic since, globally, academic eligibility was defined either by passing an examination or by securing a high score in it and mandating a mere appearance had no academic rationale, he said. It appeared that it had been designed solely to normalise and expand NEET across society, he said.

Such a move would only end up forcing millions in the country to avail coaching, thus profiting NEET coaching centres at the cost of poor families and even the earlier prescription of the NEET score as a qualification for MBBS admissions had been progressively diluted through extremely low cut-offs, amounting to almost zero, making the quality argument totally irrelevant, he said.