Garga Chatterjee
The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) as a common entrance exam is biased against students who have studied in non-Hindi mother-tongue medium, students who have studied in state boards, students who are poor and from a rural background. This bias towards urban, rich, Anglo-Hindi students in the form of the CBSE syllabus affects not only aspiring doctors but also the health-care system. Also, this centralization of power and influence in the hands of Delhi in matters of education is an ominous sign for our pluralist democracy as a whole.
Let’s remind ourselves what medical entrances and hence, medical colleges are not for. They are not for providing good exam takers of 12th standard science with a prize in the form of a lucrative career. They are also not for nourishing holy cows like ‘national integration’, filling the medical college seats with the most ‘meritorious’ (with all the dubious assumptions associated with that term) or worsen the already skewed urban rural divide in the density of doctors. At a very basic level, it is to produce trained health workers who would provide health-care to the multitude and/or advance the understanding of human biology and diseases by research.
The particular biases NEET are a grave challenge to these objectives. In the Indian Union, doctor density is very low. It is abysmally lower in rural areas. By handing an entrance exam advantage and hence medical college seats to students of a board who tend to be more urban with an ethno-linguistic bias, the health of hundreds of millions are being put at jeopardy.
Experience from non-Hindi states show that students who hail from rural areas and who studied in their mother-tongue are the ones who are over-represented in the rural public health system. Moreover, in the communicative art that is medical practice at the grassroots, those who are divided by language, culture, class, etc from the masses are less likely to get to the heart of the complex social context of disease in South Asia and hence would be sub-standard care-givers for the grassroots. The NEET plans to not only destroy the dream of poor, rural, non-Hindi mother-language medium students (that is, a plurality of all students) of becoming a doctor, it also wants to create a cadre of doctors who want urban and foreign careers, with lesser ties to soil and the realities of rural areas, where the majority live. Most states already find it hard to get qualified doctors for rural postings. An urban rich bias will destroy the system irreparably. The only beneficiaries of this regressive move will be private nursing homes, big health-care chains and of course USA – medical colleges of the Indian Union will serve as supply factories for these entities, at a greater degree than it is now.
The anxiety of many parents and students on the NEET imposition is apparent. So is the solution they have planned. Many say, if they had known, they would have put their children in CBSE schools. This is exactly what the central governments have always wanted – an opportunity to catch more students whose lives can be affected by their periodic ideology driven syllabus changing fiats via NCERT and CBSE. The Indian Union government has always believed that deracination and diversity-destruction of the various ethno-linguistic nationalities of the Indian Union through top-down manipulation and usage of various carrots and sticks is a path to a homogeneous Indian-ness. It is not accidental that Bollywood, cricket and other aspects of the Anglo-Hindi culture sphere created by post-liberalization corporate interests (including urban corporate health-care giants) have exactly this deracinated 'ideal Indian' consumer in mind.
State board students have no clue about the immensity of the forces stacked up against them. NEET paves the way for that great unstated New Delhi dream – the effective destruction of state boards and hence the destruction of all the possible well-springs of autonomous ideological streams that give precedence to sentiments, realizations and consciousnesses that tie an individual to one's own society and homeland. This makes NEET a criminal project of epic proportions, something that has already been partially achieved by the introduction of a common engineering entrance examination throughout the Indian Union.
Early unstructured observations reveal a huge surge in the proportion of central-board students in engineering colleges everywhere. A side-effect of that is in the form of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan type of political disturbances in hallowed institutions like West Bengal's Jadavpur University for the first time where some are finding the academic and ideological culture of Bengal alien and in opposition to what their own academic and socio-economic and ideological rearing taught them as ideal. The political clout of the rootless, migrant, urban, middle and upper-middle classes steeped in Anglo-Hindi national consciousness is at its peak. They are the first citizens of the Union. It is not surprising that NEET finds huge support in this group. This support for schemes that ensure legal over-representation in the name of uniformity or merit overlaps hugely with opposition to reservation. This demographic overlap is probably not accidental.
What may be effective and efficient in homogeneous and unitary nations is a formula for selective cultural genocide in a nation of nations formation like the Indian Union. Which is why autonomy of state boards need to be protected. At this point, it’s important to remember that in Ambedkar's constitution, education was squarely in the state list and Delhi had no business in parking its nose through its CBSE and other agencies. During the emergency, Indira Gandhi's government transferred it to the Concurrent list, which is all but euphemism for the Union list. Now, the NEET might help CBSE cannibalize prestigious state boards and reduce the latter to the status of school-leaving certificate printers for the rural vernacular poor, like how Madrassa boards now are. That’s how much Delhi's power had grown since 1950. That’s how much we have fallen. NEET is a medicine whose side-effects are much more damaging than the disease it claims to cure. It is time for the non-Hindi states to get together, curb the powers of the Medical Council of India and make concurrence of state medical councils obligatory, and put education back into the state list, where it originally belonged in Babasaheb's constitution.
