Neet challenge to federalism

The Tamil Nadu government is set to pick up its gloves again to put the surgically removed NEET Bills back on the table after cleaning up the purported shortcomings of its earlier version.

The Tamil Nadu government is set to pick up its gloves again to put the surgically removed NEET Bills back on the table after cleaning up the purported shortcomings of its earlier version. Following the Parliamentary triumph of getting postal exams cancelled in Tamil Nadu, the AIADMK government has another fight on its hands.

The Centre’s clinical affidavit before the Madras High Court that the two NEET Bills of the Tamil Nadu government were rejected and returned to the state in September 2017 has left both the ruling and opposition parties bruised. The state government quickly said it would write another letter to the Centre, seeking reasons for rejecting the Bills.

The state law minister, C Ve Shanmugam, has even said the government is ready to move the Supreme Court if the Centre failed to do so. Ironically, it was the Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench that mandated NEET in 2016, though the court had earlier quashed such a proposal introduced during the UPA rule. Now, Union HRD Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal ‘Nishank’ has reiterated in the Lok Sabha the need for a uniform entrance exam.

It is important to understand that a uniform entrance policy holds good only if there is uniform literacy rate in the country. According to the latest National Human Resources Development survey, Tamil Nadu has recorded a Gross Enrolment Ratio of 46.9%, the highest in the country. This is a statistical measure of the number of students enrolled in undergraduate, postgraduate and research programmes.

In a federal setup, NEET is symptomatic of ‘unitarising’ the structure. Since education is on the concurrent list, individual states’ performances must be the underlying narrative in this discourse. The AIADMK and DMK have been demanding that education be shifted to the state list. In a politically and socially disparate country like India, this must be given serious thought, especially if the federal structure is to be respected, and preserved.

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