Understanding TN’s resistance to NEET
More than a dozen students have died by suicide across the state either due to fear of taking the exam or failing the exam.
This September 12, M Chatriyan will be proceeding towards his fourth attempt at the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), a uniform annual entrance examination to gain entry into India’s undergraduate medical courses in the government and private colleges. His desire to become a doctor has kept him trying consistently despite his family’s meagre means to afford such time and expense. This isn’t uncommon in Tamil Nadu, which has one of the highest medical aspirants and doctors in the country.
Following a Supreme Court ruling, the NEET became a reality in 2017 in the state. Since then, the state has tried to exempt itself from the exam through an ordinance, inside court halls and negotiations with the Union government, and civil society protests spilt over to the streets, but nothing has worked.
Now the state has renewed its fight to be exempted once again since the DMK government took over in May this year. The new government constituted a committee, chaired by Justice A K Rajan, to study the adverse impact of NEET on socially and economically backward students. After submitting the report to chief minister M K Stalin on July 14, Rajan said that a majority among the 86,343 stakeholders in the exercise were against NEET. And the government, as promised in its election manifesto, is working to annul NEET by introducing legislation and obtaining the consent of President Ram Nath Kovind.
The staunch resistance to NEET originated from the plight of disadvantaged students like Chatriyan from Tamil Nadu’s hinterlands, who have to compete with urban and affluent students across the country with more access to resources to crack the exam. Like any other exam, NEET is marred by the tragedy of students dying by suicide. Chatriyan is a Dalit student, who hails from the Ariyalur district, which lags in development, and people depend on agriculture and work in cement factories. His family, too, engaged in cashew business from agricultural lands, but after plunging into debt, his parents became coolies when he was a child.
A few months after completing his board exams in 2018, in his first attempt, he scored only 99 out of 720. “I didn’t know the answers to questions in NEET,” says Chatriyan. “We didn’t know what to study for the exam. We had no reference books. The school teachers didn’t have any knowledge about the exam, either.” He says that he was misinformed by his friends, who also wrote NEET, that even if they passed theycould get admissions given the quota for SC/ST. The cut off for SC/ST category in NEET is 42% or 147-113 score range. Chatriyan had qualified with minimum marks but it wasn’t enough for admission. This was the case in his two subsequent attempts, but he improved each time scoring 216 and 265.
Commercialisation of NEET
Only one among Chatriyan’s five friends cleared NEET. That friend lived and learnt at a private institute for a year which helped him get into a private medical college in Coimbatore. Private coaching institutes charge anywhere between ₹2.5 lakh and ₹5 lakh for a single year and some offer crash courses. Tamil Nadu began offering free coaching to government and government-aided school students to prepare for NEET. Last year more than 25,000 students enrolled in this online due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Rajan panel is yet to make its report public but it has noted the turnover of all private coaching centres put together in Tamil Nadu. “It’s a big business but this isn’t solely because of NEET,” a panel member said on condition of anonymity. “Even if NEET isn’t there, these centres will be coaching for some other exam.”
According to the Tamil Nadu government’s data submitted to the Madras high court in 2019, only 2.1% who got admitted to all medical colleges that year didn’t have private coaching. Out of this only, 1.5% entered into government medical colleges.
Merit or Injustice?
Before NEET, Tamil Nadu considered the class 12 board exam as a parameter for admissions to medical colleges. In 2018, Tamil Nadu revised its erstwhile basic state board syllabus and began introducing updated textbooks. An analysis of the NEET question paper, which covers Biology, Chemistry and Physics as multiple choice questions with negative marking, showed that 97% of the questions in 2020 were covered in the updated textbooks.
Educationist Jayprakash Gandhi was initially an advocate for NEET and over the years its functioning made him question its purpose. “Before NEET came in, Tamil Nadu students who joined MBBS with just class 12 scores had outperformed other states in the NEET postgraduate (PG) exams. This shows that the argument that NEET produces better quality doctors is false,” says Gandhi. “More than 70% of those writing NEET (UG) are repeaters.”
The state has a doctor for every 253 people, a ratio, which is on par with Scandinavian countries and above norms of the WHO. One in eight doctors from India is from Tamil Nadu, based on data from the Medical Council of India provided by former union health minister Harsh Vardhan in the Parliament in 2019.
Combined with the social justice politics of the Dravidian movement, the state established educational institutions in every district and its 69% caste-based reservation system made education accessible to its various sections. With a 51.4% gross enrollment ratio (students enrolling in higher education) in 2019-2020, Tamil Nadu is twice the national average (27.1%), and has also surpassed Nation Education Policy’s target of 50% enrollment by 2030.
While there was no Common Entrance Test (CET) when professional courses were introduced in Tamil Nadu, a government order in May 1984 established CET for medicine, engineering, agriculture, etc. In 2006, Tamil Nadu appointed a committee to study its impact, based on which the state abolished the CET as it favoured city students who could access private coaching. The same argument has been repeated with NEET.
Former health minister and physician in the MG Ramachandran (MGR) cabinet Dr K V Hande is in support of the exam and says it requires the right coaching. “In my view, when the entire country is going in one direction, why should Tamil Nadu be going in a different direction?” asks the 94-year-old. He says if he were the health minister now he would open multiple coaching centres with one in each taluk. Tamil Nadu government presently has 400-odd coaching centres across the state.
Suicides
Chatriyan lives 10km away from the village of another Dalit teenager, who died by suicide in 2017 after failing in NEET, though she was a school topper with 98%. The girl’s death led to widespread protests across Tamil Nadu. Since then, the word NEET became a symbolised evil and she became the face of the struggle against the exam. Similarly, another student from Ariyalur died by suicide in 2020 after failing to clear NEET twice. More than a dozen students have died by suicide across the state either due to fear of taking the exam or failing the exam.
The politics
It was in 2010, under the UPA 2 when the country’s medical education regulator the Medical Council of India amended regulations to make way for NEET. It was meant to roll out by 2021 but nationwide protests from states such as Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh delayed the implementation until 2016.
Successive chief ministers M Karunanidhi and J Jayalalithaa opposed NEET. It’s in one of the few issues where the two warring Dravidian parties concur. Since there is no data from the NTA on the configurations of medical college admissions, different sections share different data to argue their stance. Dr Ezhilan, Naganathan a physician and DMK MLA from Chennai filed a range of RTIs related to NEET through which he says they found that before 2017, 90% of students who got into government medical colleges were from government schools, government-aided schools or small, private schools showing that the previous admissions method offered opportunities for the most marginalised students to become doctors.
The BJP, which is the only party in Tamil Nadu that is pro-NEET, paints a different picture. Only 100 students from government schools got admissions into MBBS for ten years (2007-2017) before NEET, says state BJP general secretary Karu Nagarajan from RTIs and surveys they have collated which Ezhilan says is incomplete information. “It is NEET that’s supporting government students,” Nagarajan defends.
Their alliance leader the AIADMK last year during its regime introduced a 7.5% horizontal reservation in medical colleges for government school students who clear NEET. This ensured that government school students got 405 seats in the 2020-2021 academic year as opposed to six seats earlier. “Before NEET poor students were being cheated because those who could afford paid up to a crore under the management quota,” Nagarajan says.
Senior advocate and DMK MP P Wilson is confident that the state can avail an exemption within legal provisions. He uses the example of jallikattu (bull-taming traditional sport in Tamil Nadu) which was banned under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960 by the Supreme Court but Tamil Nadu brought in an ordinance to allow the sport and the President gave his assent in 2017.