Garga Chatterjee
The Supreme Court of India has revived from death the spectre of a common medical entrance examination for all medical colleges. Ostensibly, this common entrance examination called National Eligibility Entrance Test (NEET) is to create a level playing field. Wide-ranging protests, rail-rokos and even clashes with police across many non-Hindi states (Assam, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, among others), vehement opposition from students, doctors (especially rural doctors associations and Indian Medical Association state branches), parents, non-commercial educationists, political parties and even social justice organizations as well as opposition from non-Hindi state governments have by now demonstrated that many fear that the effect will be exactly the opposite. They fear that this will give huge advantage to students of Delhi-headquartered boards like CBSE – who also tend to be more urban, richer, more upper-caste, less likely to be from non-Hindi states and not having the principal language of non-Hindi states as their first language. In short, they will be unrepresentative in a way that will deepen already existing inequities that exist along various axes of class, caste, language, location and rootedness, among others. Many fear this will destroy prestigious state boards as we know them.
While the NEET judgement was in response to admission related corruption in private institutions, other reasons have been offered in its support. They include the relief this will provide students giving multiple entrance tests, lessening of corruption in the admission tests due to supervision of Medical Council of India and CBSE and finally, the purported desirability of a common syllabus, which will ensure that similar grades of physicians are produced all around (a ridiculous idea, since medical entrance exams don't make doctors, MBBS exams after admission do).
Firstly, most major states already held their own state medical entrance exam. Private medical colleges are not located in air but on the soil of some state. A simple solution would have been to admit students through already-existing state medical entrance exam. States like West Bengal and others have nearly 4 decades of experience of organizing transparent medical entrance exams. Why the excuse of corruption somewhere be used to change admission policies everywhere is beyond understanding.
Capitation-fee corruption for management quota of private institutions is a headache only for people who can pay in tens of lakhs and even crores; in short, not even 5% of the students who take medical entrance exams. It’s a problem of the upper-middle class and the super-rich which obscenely fancies itself as the “common man”.
On the question of relief to multi-exam taking students, it’s important to take note of reality. What proportion of all medical entrance test takers across all states do they form and who are they? It is astonishing that no such data has ever been presented – likely because anecdotal experiences suggest that this is a very small proportion of students.
Let us get some numbers. Across multiple AIIMS institutes, their common entrance test attracted about 1 lakh students last year. This figure is under 10% of the medical college admission seekers across all states. Just in Maharashtra, about 4 lakh students took the CET exam this year (http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/sc-to-hear-review-petition-challenging-neet-today-2786761/). When we compare to number of all Class XII science students across all states, irrespective of entrance-taking, the percentage become negligible. And even among that small minority, CBSE like central-board students are hugely over-represented in this multiple entrance test taking class. The fact that the NEET judgement might imply science syllabus changes across many boards, tells us how the stupendous majority is being victimized and marginalized for the convenience of a tiny minority. Among the major characteristics of this minority that I mentioned earlier, what stands out is the board- CBSE.
It is the CBSE syllabus that will be followed for NEET. Is this the largest board in Indian Union? No. Just Maharashtra state board has more Class XII students compared to CBSE all over the Indian Union. If these statistics comes as a surprise to some of us, we need to seriously question our sense of standard and get out of our metro-centric Anglo-Hindi bubbles. Is that the 'best' board in some academic sense? Hardly so. Are students studying science at the 12th standard in the CBSE syllabus uniquely equipped with an understanding of the sciences that is unparalleled by the state-boards? Or in other words if the state-boards are being forced to emulate the CBSE (in the name of aligning syllabi), is it something worth emulating?
By rigorous research work (published in Current Science, 2009) that reviewed the comparative performance of students from different boards, Anil Kumar and Dibakar Chatterjee, scientists at the Indian Institute of Science, showed that when it comes to science proficiency, CBSE is not numero uno. West Bengal board students did better than CBSE students in all 4 science subjects – Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Mathematics. Andhra Pradesh does better than CBSE in Mathematics and Physics. By the same metric, Maharashtra is hardly the worst performing state as it was in NEET that was held in 2013 before it was scrapped. Tellingly, neither West Bengal nor Andhra Pradesh were top performing states in the NEET. Independent non-CBSE excellence has thus become an albatross around their neck. The CBSE ‘pattern’ of syllabus has become the standard, even though research shows it isn’t the best.
About corruption and MCI, the lesser said the better. Its recent chief Ketan Desai was charged for giving affiliation to a private medical college. In 2015, the CBSE organized All India Pre Medical Test (AIPIMT) was cancelled due to widespread cheating (http://www.newindianexpress.com/columns/NEET-Returns-in-not-so-Neat-a-Manner/2016/05/04/article3413743.ece). When a body such as the Ketan Desai-tainted MCI approaches the Supreme Court to fight corruption and SC employs the 2015 cheating-scam tainted CBSE to ensure a fair and free examination, we have to understand the deeper games being played.
CBSE schools are naturally very excited about the NEET (http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/cbse-schools-keenly-anticipate-neet-enforcement/article8567946.ece) as it hands their students a huge undeserved competitive advantage over the stupendous majority. After the NEET judgement, we are sure to see a mushrooming of CBSE schools everywhere and an exodus from state boards of the class who can pay for such private CBSE schools. There is already a surge in the business of CBSE syllabus based coaching institutes (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/NEET-prep-in-Tamil-Nadu-turns-costlier-institutes-jack-up-fees/articleshow/52159683.cms) – all of this is big and often corrupt business, but that doesn't seem to matter.
Therein lies the danger where the SC ruling is already creating a caste system between boards and forcing everyone else to align with the Centre which isn't necessarily the best as described earlier. Framed from Delhi, after ‘consultation’ (it has to be one of the most abused terms in a flawed federal system), the CBSE based NEET syllabus favours those who have undergone their schooling and training in the CBSE/ISC framework, the syllabus being a vital component of that framework. State boards with syllabi that differ considerably from the CBSE are at an unfair disadvantage – they have to change or perish, for absolutely no reason. The viability or ‘worth’ of a board of education’s science syllabus then is not in how well it teaches science to the students but, incredibly, by how well it has adapted (or not) the basic framework of a Delhi-based boards’ syllabus. This will reduce the importance of the Class XII exam and we will increasingly see coaching institutes operating under the legal shell of a school.
This Delhi-headquartered board and Anglo-Hindi bias in so-called 'all India' medical entrances is not new. Central board students (constituting less than 10% of Class 12 students) have till now enjoyed a de-facto 15% reservation in all medical colleges, as the syllabus of the AIPMT exam (held in Hindi and English only – though no MBBS courses are taught in Hindi) through which these seats were filled was modelled on CBSE syllabus and conducted by CBSE. So much so, that in West Bengal, students coming through this 'all-India' were from Hindi-belt central board schools almost to the last man and in West Bengal were referred to, simply as 'CBSEs' or 'Delhi boards'. Such a naked violation of the principle of natural justice and fairness went unchallenged as the positive beneficiaries of this provision constituted the unofficial first-class citizens of the Indian Union – typically well-to-do, urban, largely upper-caste Hindu males from Hindi-speaking areas studying in Delhi-headquartered school boards. Since Hindi areas have much lesser number of medical colleges per capita, the AIPMT is a system to lodge North Indian student in South and East India in disproportionately high numbers, under the innocuous dissent-stopping fig-leaf of 'All-India'.
The NEET seeks to create a hugely expanded version of this unjust dominance over all seats of all medical colleges in the Indian Union. Given the explicit bias, it is pertinent to ask, in which board do grandsons and granddaughters of the judges of the Supreme Court study? In which board do the sons and daughters of the lawyers defending the NEET, the functionaries of CBSE and MCI head-office study? Does this class more closely match the social profile of people studying in central boards or state boards? What is the definition of conflict of interest in such cases? The Supreme Court ruling of holding a test under CBSE syllabus thus violates the fundamental legal principle of fairness.
A state board student studying in non-Hindi mother-tongue will have to compete against a CBSE student who has studied 12 years of incremental science syllabus learning. For example, in Tamil Nadu, the Biology syllabus is about 70% different between the state board and CBSE (http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/another-reason-neet-bad-idea-what-about-those-who-dont-know-english-or-hindi-42665). Can a state be forced to change its board syllabus to align with central syllabus or otherwise risk playing in an unfair non-level playing field? That makes a mockery of the federal structure of the Indian Union constitution.
