Garga Chatterjee The highly controversial National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for admission to medical and dental colleges in the Indian Union took place earlier this month. And immediately afterwards, the huge stream of complaints from all corners of the Indian Union showed the sheer incompetency, bias and insensitivity of the CBSE in conducting the exam. After NEET started a few years ago, a Supreme Court bench headed by then Chief Justice of India Alatamas Kabir had scrapped the NEET. State medical entrance exams resumed and went on without a hitch. NEET was reinstituted after another judgment reversed the earlier one. The NEET exam replaces all state based medical entrance exams and has been opposed strongly by multiple non Hindi states. State board students form a stupendous majority of medical aspirants in every non Hindi state. When state medical entrances used to happen, state board students used to dominate the 85% state quota while CBSE/ISC students dominated the 15% All-India quota. The highly biased nature of the NEET will be apparent from the following prediction that I will now make – more than 50% SPOTS in the top 20 rank in NEET will be occupied by CBSE/ISC students even as they will form a tiny minority among the NEET exam taking student population. An exam conducted by CBSE creates an unequal playing field for those students and dashes the career dreams of a majority to favour the tiny CBSE minority. Even then, it was steam-rolled without caring about public opinion in these states. The most serious complaints have come from West Bengal and Gujarat. Firstly, both these states had to fight even to get Bangla and Gujarati language versions of the question papers in NEET in the first place. At first, CBSE didn't agree but only did so after a lot of popular pressure arising out of the student population, a huge majority of whom study in their Bangla and Gujarati mother tongue. Notwithstanding the huge disadvantage these students face due to the biased CBSE syllabus, they went forward and took the NEET exam. But CBSE had other plans. One would imagine that a common medical entrance test would also have a question paper that is common for all students. Not so for the CBSE organized NEET. They created question papers where the question sets were different in different langauges. Not just typographical differences; these were different question sets altogether. The Bangla and Gujarati language question paper was much tougher than the Hindi language one, for instance. This is a scandal of epic proportion that victimizes particular linguistic groups. Is it accidental that Gujarat and West Bengal were also among the more vocal states that had demanded question papers in their own language? While CBSE gave in to that demand, no one had imagined that the question sets in those languages would be different and tougher from those that were printed in Hindi. CBSE had never mentioned that there would be different question sets for different languages. How can such a test be called “uniform”, that much touted principle that was given in support of NEET? The discrimination did not stop here. Even the number of questions in Hindi question set and Bangla question set were different. This means that each error would cost much less to a Hindi language exam taker than a Bangla language exam taker. What this means is that Gujarati and Bangla medium students will rank much lower or not at all in the NEET merit list. Now here is the catch. CBSE schools are not Gujarati medium in Gujarat or Bangla medium in West Bengal. Gujarati or Bangla medium schools are all state board schools. Thus, whatever small chance they had in spite of the huge odds in terms of a biased CBSE syllabus was also systematically destroyed. But who gained from this vis-a-vis state quota seats of Gujarat and West Bengal? Obviously students in schools which are not Bangla or Gujarati medium. Which boards are these non Bangla or non Gujarati medium schools affiliated to? They are affiliated to Delhi headquartered boards, namely ISC and CBSE. It is a shame that such a dirty game was played with the future of lakhs of students whose only “fault” was they studied hard in Bangla or Gujarati in Bengal or Gujarat respectively in Bengal or Gujarat state board. They are the majority. The West Bengal state government has taken very serious note of this. Not at all enthusiastic about NEET in the first place, the West Bengal government has declared that it will pursue this victimization issue and take it “as far as it needs to be taken”. West Bengal state higher education minister, Partha Chatterjee, has said that he will write to the CBSE on this issue and has perceptively pointed out that this different and tougher question paper was “an attack on the merit of the students of Bengal. Students from the state are being deprived deliberately. We strongly protest this discrimination on the part of the CBSE”. He also said that the West Bengal medical education directorate would be consulted and that West Bengal would seek re-examination. This intervention has Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's support. West Bengal had already pulled out of the Indian Union wide common engineering entrance test due to similar reasons. For West Bengal, this is especially shocking since West Bengal's Joint Entrance Board has a multi-decade long experience in conducting medical entrance exams without leaks or hitch. It is unclear why West Bengal has to suffer due to centralizing whims of Delhi's agencies and for the benefit of students affiliated to Delhi-headquartered boards. The problems with the NEET yesterday didn't end there. Question paper leaks were reported from the Hindi-states of Bihar and Rajasthan. This is a shocking level of incompetency, if not a conspiracy. Why is it that all-India exam question paper leaks never happen solely in a non Hindi state but always in Hindi states? Is this pattern accidental? These questions cannot be brushed aside when we look at Chatterjee's statement about the tougher Bangla question paper when he says, “The CBSE must have done this at the behest of somebody.” Experts have claimed that the question papers themselves were flawed with some ambiguous questions (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chandigarh/three-biology-questions-unclear-in-neet-expert/articleshow/58589976.cms ). If such is the state of matters, then what people have witnessed in the name of NEET is shameful. But the shame does not end there. Female students in Kerala have been forced to remove their underwear for the exam. Many of them have been psychologically traumatized and hence their exam preparation has been made completely useless. This has created an uproar in Kerala and the Chief Minister of Kerala P. Vijayan has taken serious note of this matter and tweeted “Complaints have arisen about the conduct of NEET exams. Condemnable conduct of invigilators amount to human rights violation. ” The NEET has created a booming business for CBSE schools and NEET specific coaching centres. Rajasthan's city of Kota has an infamous mini cottage industry in such exam preparations which is also in news for huge numbers of suicides among such coaching class students. NEET thus is anti-poor, anti-non-Anglo-Hindi medium, anti-State board. That is basically the majority of students. That these issues have been brushed aside by Medical Council of India and CBSE so easily shows the intersectional caste-class-language elitism of the powerful who control these agencies. For the good of all, NEET needs to be scrapped. The Tamil Nadu government has already prepared a bill to exempt Tamil Nadu from NEET and sent it for Presidential assent. Given the recent alignment of the President of India in favour of centralization of all powers, the assent seems highly unlikely. NEET is a neat way to roll back the small gains that rural vernacular students of non Hindi states have been able to make in terms of career. It has to go. No institution or agency or their whims and conspiracies are more important than the people.
