Hundreds of students from Tamil Nadu are busy booking train and bus tickets to neighbouring Kerala as the Supreme Court stayed a Madras High Court's direction to the CBSE to set up additional centres for national eligibility-cum-entrance test (NEET) in the state.
Examination for the undergraduate medical courses will be held on May 6. The CBSE had earlier issued admit cards to Tamil Nadu students allocating then examination centres in states like Kerala, Karnataka and Rajasthan.
Challenging the CBSE decision, a PIL was filed in the Madras High Court which directed the board to set up additional exam centres in the state to accommodate all the students from the state. The high court decision came as a ray of hope for these students, but the board moved the Supreme Court in the last minute, saying the exam centres cannot be changed in such a short notice.
Now, students are now left in a limbo. Reports say that about 1,500 students have been alloted seats in Kerala, Karnataka and Rajasthan. In the crucial, penultimate days leading to the NEET examinations, hundreds of aspirants from Tamil Nadu are now figuring out ways to reach their centres and hunting for accomodations. Parents are complaining that they are unable to get train tickets to reach the centres due to rush on account of the summer vacations.
While staying the high court order, the top court also directed the CBSE to ensure that the same doesn’t happen from next year.
Some of the parents say they had already booked train tickets and hotel rooms in Kochi and other cities in Kerala. But they later cancelled it hoping that the CBSE would adhere to the Madras High Court order. The parents complain that they will now have to depend on bus or other private transport facilities as train tickets were not available due to the summer holidays.
Students allege that many of the centres in Kochi are not in the city limit, but on the outskirts and are difficult to be located. They also worry that the last minute stress will affect their performance in the examination.
Angry citizens have taken to the social media to question the CBSE's move to allocate NEET examination centres outside the state. Apparently, NEET candidates only from Tamil Nadu have been allotted centres outside the state. Twitteratti did not even shy away from blaming the judiciary.
All said, the CBSE has to be blamed for this eleventh-hour NEET mess up.
Meanwhile, Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) president Anbumani Ramadoss urged the government to bear the expense of candidates alloted centre outside the state.
Tweeting about the issue, actor Kamal Haasan said, “In this digital, internet age, asking students from Tamil Nadu to go to Rajasthan and Kerala to write NEET is injustice. Why can’t they write from here?”
The NEET examination is held for admission to MBBS and BDS courses in India in medical and dental colleges run with the approval of Medical Council of India and Dental Council of India under the ministry of health and family welfare. NEET 2018 comes with a slew of new features, including a removal of the cap on the number of NEET attempts and addition of Urdu as a language option.