Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

Banerjee: NEET abolition missive

The political storm generated in Parliament in Delhi by the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) scam, in which as many as 67 students scored a perfect 720, and over 1,500 were awarded booster “grace marks”, has come as a fortuitous opportunity for Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) government and chief minister Mamata Banerjee to strike back at the BJP. Banerjee and TMC have been vocal critics of the centralisation of education, including the imposition of national exams such as NEET. Therefore, the NEET-UG scandal, which led to the peremptory cancellation of NEET-PG and UGC-NET, has provided her an opportunity to build a strong narrative of spreading discontent with the education policies and initiatives of the BJP/NDA government at the Centre.

On June 24, Banerjee wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to abolish NEET-UG and revert to the system of states conducting their own medical college entrance exams. “The decentralised system was later changed to a unitary and centralised system of examination (NEET) so as to take complete control of admissions in the country to medical courses without any involvement of state governments. This is completely unacceptable and violates the true spirit of the federal structure of the country. Further, the present system has led to massive corruption which benefits only the rich who can afford to pay (for coaching classes), while meritorious students belonging to the poor and middle class suffer and are the biggest victims,” said the missive from Banerjee to the PM. She also added that states spend over Rs.50 lakh per doctor towards education and internship, which is why states “should be given freedom to select medical students through joint entrance examination”.

This year, 1.02 lakh students from West Bengal wrote NEET-UG 2024 of whom 59,053 passed with three scoring the maximum possible 720 marks. It is pertinent to note that students from West Bengal, which hosts 34 medical colleges, have always excelled in medical entrance exams. In a state where unemployment is rife — a major problem inherited by Banerjee who routed the Left Front in the historic state legislative election of 2011 — the desperation of school-leavers to succeed in exams such as NEET, which provides entry into employment with an average salary of Rs.50,000-60,000 per month, is intense. Unsurprisingly, 150,000-200,000 school-leavers from Bengal write NEET-UG exam every year.

However, with centrally conducted NEET-UG having transformed into the sole medical entrance exam since 2017, students of Bengali-medium schools have been at a disadvantage in terms of English fluency and differences of syllabus. The test prep fees demanded by coaching schools of Rs.2-3 lakh per year is exorbitant for most Bengali medium school students who tend to be from underprivileged backgrounds.

Therefore in January, the TMC government introduced Yogyashree, a comprehensive social welfare scheme in which 50 test prep centres across the state started providing free NEET-UG and IIT-Mains training for scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students. This initiative has proved a great success. In its first year of launch, 75 Yogyasree trained students cracked JEE (Main) — of whom 25 passed JEE (Advanced) bagging 13 seats, 432 cleared WBJEE, and 110 cleared NEET-UG.

Enthused by the success of the Yogyashree experiment and TMC bagging 29 of the state’s 42 seats in the Lok Sabha in the recently concluded General Election 2024, on June 11 the TMC government broadened the scope of the scheme to include students from religious minorities, and OBC categories to enable more students from underprivileged households opportunity to pursue careers in engineering and medicine. This announcement has been greeted with much jubilation statewide. Therefore, her appeal for reversion to state conducted medical entrance tests has received the support of Kolkata’s influential bhadralok (cultured middle class) which values higher education.

Occurances of major disasters in BJP-ruled states — bridge collapses in Bihar and roof collapses in Delhi and Rajkot airports, cracks in Rs.777 crore Pragati Maidan tunnel inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi in June 2022, and the June 17 train accident in which a goods train rammed into the Kanchanjunga Express travelling to Kolkata killing ten and injuring 25 — have generated considerable scepticism about the tall promises and project management capabilities of the BJP government at the Centre. According to the state commentariat, the BJP’s struggle to establish a stronger presence in Bengal, a state where leadership plays a crucial role in shaping voter behaviour, has suffered a severe setback.