TN health minister meets Pradhan over demand to scrap NEET

Reiterating the call to scrap the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), Tamil Nadu health minister M Subramanian on Thursday met Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Delhi to allow the state to fill admissions to all professional courses on the basis of class 12 marks

Published on: Jul 16, 2021, 24:00:08 IST

By HT correspondent, Chennai

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Reiterating the call to scrap the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), Tamil Nadu health minister M Subramanian on Thursday met Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan in Delhi to allow the state to fill admissions to all professional courses on the basis of class 12 marks.

He urged the Union government to cancel all national level entrance exams like NEET required for admissions into professional courses like the CBSE cancelled class 12 exams. The board exams for class XII were cancelled owing to the pandemic and Tamil Nadu has constituted a committee to evaluate and decide on class 12 marks. Before NEET entered Tamil Nadu in 2017, medical college admissions were based on class 12 marks.

This meeting comes a day after the AK Rajan committee submitted its report to chief minister M K Stalin after studying the impact of NEET on socially and economically backward medical aspirants. More than 80,000 persons had submitted their opinions and most of them were against NEET, Rajan had said. On July 13, the Madras high court dismissed a plea filed by the BJP challenging the formation of the committee. Abolishing NEET is one of the election promises of the DMK and it is supported by other regional parties. Subramanian in his letter said that NEET deprives opportunities for rural students. “Majority of them study in their mother tongue and do not have resources/access to the coaching institutions,” he said.

Subramanian also met union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya seeking additional vaccines, to start operations at vaccine facilities at Chengalpet and Nilgiris districts and asked for more funds. “They immediately granted ₹800 crore,” he told reporters in Delhi.

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