The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for undergraduate medical courses has been the subject of a series of recent controversies in Tamil Nadu.

Regional political parties such as Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), firebrand fringe demagogues such as Seeman, and others have been accusing the Union government of ‘imposing’ NEET on Tamil Nadu’s students. Many conspiracy theories have been spun around this idea. For example, it has been suggested that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government is using NEET to stealthily undo reservations for backward classes.

This article is an attempt to dispassionately analyse the origins, results, and impact of NEET on Tamil Nadu’s students aspiring to become doctors.

Let us begin with the origins of NEET.

Contrary to current narrative being encouraged by DMK and other elements, the origins of NEET belong to the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government era, of which DMK was a part.

NEET had been proposed to replace all other existing admission procedures for medical college seats back in 2010. It was proposed that state medical entrance exams, where they existed, be done away with, as also college interview processes and other intermediaries. This was naturally seen as an unacceptable incursion into the turf of many who stood to benefit from such processes. Over 100 petitions were filed in the Supreme Court against it. In July 2013, the Supreme Court quashed the NEET proposal citing violation of articles 19, 25, 26, 29 and 30 of the Constitution. This decision was then reversed by a Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court in April 2016.

Considering the timelines involved and other difficulties, seats in government medical colleges and government seats in private medical colleges were exempt from NEET in 2016. However, this exemption does not apply from 2017 onwards and NEET remains universal with over a million students writing it.

The second lie being spread by vested interests is that rural students from Tamil Nadu are at a severe disadvantage because of NEET. Let us examine this claim with the help of some data.

Between 2009 and 2013, merely 177 Tamil Nadu government school students secured MBBS admissions. That is, to repeat, only 177 students from government schools were able to get into MBBS course over a five-year period, and all this was before NEET. In 2014, this number was 32, in 2015 it was 35, and in 2016 once again only 35 students from Tamil Nadu government schools made it.

What these meagre numbers show is that students of private schools probably had access to expensive coaching facilities and were beating rural/government school students even before NEET. How come there had been little to no outrage about the meagre representation of government school/rural school students in the admissions paradigm before NEET?

Let us remember that until 2006, Tamil Nadu had its own state medical and engineering entrance examinations. So what you have now is the propaganda that a mere entrance exam severely discriminates against rural/government school students even as we know that only until 10 years ago Tamil Nadu had its own entrance exams.

So how did NEET perform in terms of rural and government school students getting into MBBS?

A cursory look at the district wise breakdown of admissions secured through NEET nails the lie that rural students are at a severe disadvantage due to the design of the exam. Consider the example of Namakkal, a district that had put 957 students into medical seats. This year, the district only managed 109 seats. How did this happen? The reason is that Namakkal is home to numerous “coaching factory” schools where students are made to ‘mug-up’ (i.e memorise) Plus Two syllabus without any care for analytical skills or critical evaluation. These students, until last year, were able to secure a disproportionate number of admissions because they usually did well in Plus Two exams and that was all that was needed. This year, under NEET, students are having to face the real world in a sense, and were seen struggling to compete.

So you have Namakkal, a ‘coaching factory’, that by any measure disadvantages rural and government school students seeing a correction.



But who gains when Namakkal loses? Ariyalur, a rather under-developed district, and other similar districts, have shown a good increase in the number of students they are able to send in. Ariyalur sent 21 students through NEET this year. Last year, it managed only four. The same is the case with Nilgiris, Thiruvarur, Sivagangai and Thiruvannamalai. All these districts have gained at the expense of Namakkal’s coaching factories. Surely, this is a more fairer system than before?

The third lie being propagated by fringe elements seeking to cash in on anti-NEET emotions is that NEET hurts the cause of social justice. The claim is that under NEET, students belonging to ‘forward castes’ secure more seats at the cost of ‘backward’ castes.

Once again, let us look at the numbers to understand the truth behind this claim. Some Tamil nationalist groups have even sought to spread a canard that reservations do not apply for admissions through NEET. Nevertheless such statements were quickly called out.

The propagandists sought to spread such lies based on the simplistic understanding of admission numbers. Consider the table below of community-wise take away of seats based on first 2,500 NEET/earlier rankings in Tamil Nadu. This was used in a television debate to highlight that Open Category (OC) students are securing nearly three times the number of seats under NEET and that this was evidence that ‘Brahmins’ have sneaked in stealthily through NEET. The assumption was that all OC students are Brahmins. (The table is used here to depict the narrative being propagated and is not necessarily fully correct). But what is the truth?