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.
