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DMK members meet Kerala CM over NEET
The DMK delegation handed over a copy of the letter written by Tamil Nadu CM Stalin on Monday and a copy of the report of the Justice A K Rajan Committee on NEET to Vijayan.
A delegate of DMK officer-bearers led by TKS Elangovan on Wednesday met Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan in Thiruvananthapuram to seek support in opposing the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for medical college admissions. The meeting comes days after Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin wrote a letter to his counterparts in 12 non-BJP states to press for the same.
“His (Vijayan’s) idea is that Kerala is not affected by NEET, but I told him about how education must be the right of the state and that this is about the larger question of federalism,” Elangovan, DMK’s Rajya Sabha MP, said over the phone from Thiruvananthapuram. “The state builds the infrastructure. Tamil Nadu runs more than 25 medical colleges. The state trains its teachers and students, and the Union government is taking away the state’s power. That is dangerous,” he added.
The DMK delegation handed over a copy of the letter written by Stalin on Monday and a copy of the report of the Justice A K Rajan Committee to Vijayan. The report states that NEET favours privileged students and discriminates against students from rural and poor backgrounds, and thereby it is against the principles of social justice. The report also listed several recommendations for the Tamil Nadu government, based on which the assembly passed a Bill to ban NEET in the state. This would require the President’s assent. “He (Vijayan) said that he would go through the report and come back to us,” said Elangovan.
One of the DMK’s polls promises is to scrap NEET, and after forming the government in May, Stalin constituted the Rajan committee comprising nine members. The committee worked for a month to examine the impact of NEET, where it received more than 80,000 responses from stakeholders opposing the conduct of NEET. Three medical students in Tamil Nadu died by suicide just last month fearing NEET, held on September 12. The recent deaths took a toll since 2017 – when NEET was introduced in Tamil Nadu – to more than 14 students’ deaths. Tamil Nadu seeks to go back to the pre-2017 methods where only class 12-board exam marks were used as criteria for admission.
On Monday, Stalin wrote to the chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Jharkhand, Kerala, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Rajasthan, Telangana, West Bengal, and Goa. “We need to put up a united effort to restore the primacy of state governments in administering the education sector, as envisaged in our Constitution. I look forward to your cooperation in this crucial issue,” Stalin said in the letter. In the coming days, more DMK leaders will be visiting various chief ministers addressed in the letter.
