Under pressure from MPs, government to move Supreme Court for deferring NEET

The Centre would approach the Supreme Court to defer the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), the common gateway for admissions to the medical and dental programme, by a year.
“The government has nothing to do with the decision to hold NEET from this year. This is a Supreme Court directive. But it is true that we cannot expect students to switch to a new system. We are for common entrance exam but not from this year. We’ll again approach the court for this through Attorney General and plead before it to defer it by a year,” said parliamentary affairs minister M Venkaiah Naidu in Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

Naidu was responding to demand raised by members of Parliament in Lok Sabha during zero hour. Cutting across party lines, MPs said students preparing for medical entrance tests in the states would suffer and NEET should be deferred for a year. Trinamool Congress MP Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar pointed out that students in West Bengal had been preparing for years for the test.
“They have been suddenly told that a central exam would be there. The syllabus of this NEET would be 30 per cent different from state exam syllabus,” she said. “Please initiate a legislation to do away with the court order and hold common exams in phases so that students are not anguished. Also how can students who have studied always in a regional language suddenly take the test in Hindi or English,” Dastidar said.
Bengal state medical exams were scheduled on May 17 but can’t be held due to Supreme Court orders. “Defer this exam by a year,” Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge said. Shiromani Akali Dal’s Prem Singh Chandumajra asked the Centre to include Punjabi in the seven vernacular languages in which Centre is asking the Supreme Court to allow conduct of the otherwise bilingual test.