Bengaluru: The Union government's decision to partially overturn the Supreme Court’s order and exempt state government seats from NEET this year has taken students by surprise. Not all of them are happy as they were busy preparing for NEET phase 2, scheduled for July 24.
“Following the Supreme Court order on NEET, most state board students applying for medical and dental seats had started seriously preparing for it. As the state PU course has a NCERT syllabus there was no question of any of them facing any kind of problem. CET question papers too are prepared in English and this doesn't worry them. But the state government appears to have misled the Centre,” lamented one medical aspirant, Suruchi Shet.
Another aspiring medical student, Shyamala Pujari, too was unhappy with the Centre’s decision to pass an ordinance postponing NEET for state board students to next year. “Most state students have already appeared for various national admission tests. The ordinance has been issued only to benefit a few,” she regretted. But experts feel that by not exempting private medical colleges and deemed universities from NEET, the Union government has ensured that money will not play a big role in this year’s admission process.
Says Dr. Ramachander KR, an independent academic researcher, “Even if the President approves the ordinance, it will not be applicable to private colleges, which have commercialised their admissions, but only to state- run medical colleges. CET is very transparent and the admission process is done through online seat allotment.”
Fact-sheet
- State students don’t have to appear for NEET on July 24
- All state government seats, including its quota of seats in private medical colleges, will be filled through CET ranking
- The Karnataka Examination Authority will announce the CET examination results once the state government finalises the admission rules based on the ordinance
- COMED-K and deemed universities will have to select students based on the NEET merit list
It’s not in public interest
The Union Cabinet is reported to have passed an ordinance to postpone the National Eligibility Entrance Test to the next year, overriding the Supreme Court’s direction to all medical colleges across India to only admit students through NEET this year. The court had also prohibited all state governments and medical colleges from conducting their own entrance tests.
I don’t think the ordinance is in public interest. What do the Union and state governments propose to do in the next 12 months that they cannot do in the next six weeks? If they are worried about divergence in syllabus between CBSE (that has been the basis for NEET)and state boards, it will take merely one day for the latter to pick up the CBSE syllabus and strike off whatever is not covered by their syllabus and hand it over to the CBSE, which will similarly obtain feedback from all the states before preparing the NEET paper, conforming to the common class XII syllabus across India. Only two weeks will suffice for this.
If you are talking about time required to prepare NEET question papers in regional languages, well it only means translating the English NEET paper into these languages, which can be done in three weeks if the state governments lend their officers to the CBSE for the job.
In fact, students this year will get more time after their class XII examinations to prepare for NEET scheduled for July 24. So there is no good reason to postpone it to the next year. I expect the Supreme Court to strike down this ordinance without any delay in the coming week and I also expect NEET-2 to be held as planned for all students. So I don’t advise them to become complacent.
K.V. Dhananjay, Advocate, Supreme Court
