Ordinance route to bypass SC on NEET?

​New Delhi: The Union government is mulling to take Ordinance route to to bypass the Supreme Court ruling on the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), which has been made mandatory for medical entrance across India from this year with several states airing protest against the same.

Centre begins consultations with states on test

A section of the BJP leadership and several state governments prevailed upon the Centre in making it agree to approach the apex court to defer the conduct of the second phase of NEET and in case the court does not relent issue an Ordinance. Representatives of the managements who are stay put in Delhi for the outcome of the meeting were positive that their will shall prevail for this year. "We want, for the time being to stall it (NEET).

We will plan our next moves later as the Centre is not against our interests," they added. Union Health Minister J P Nadda on Monday held a meeting with state health and education ministers in Delhi on conducting NEET-2 on July 24 wherein except the AAP government of Delhi, everyone pitched for scrapping of the examination this year citing students' interests.

Nadda told the media later that the Centre would approach the court after due consultations on all these three counts. Representatives from all states agreed that there were practical difficulties in implementing NEET from this year and urged Nadda to appeal to the court to defer the centralised test for the 2017-18 academic year.

Speaking to the media, AP Health Minister Kamineni Srinivas said though his government was not against NEET, the state government preferred a two-year respite from the order. "We do not have text books in Telugu,” he said.

He further said that there was a huge problem in translating the CBSE syllabus into Telugu and mistakes were bound to happen. "The syllabus is also different. The difference in syllabus was to the tune of 20 per cent,” he said.

Moreover, the Eamcet conducted by the state was not just confined to the Medical and Dental examinations and hence scrapping the same would affect the admissions into 13 other courses related to the examination, he said. In addition, the SC and ST category students would suffer if they could not score more than 40 per cent, he added.

Maharashtra education and health minister Vinod Tawade said, “The main thing is to protect the future of the students. The syllabus for the state examination is different and the students giving exam in regional languages will also have a problem.” Karnataka health minister UT Khader also agreed that NEET should be moved to next academic session.

“We are all in favour of NEET but implementing it this year would be a disadvantage for people who had prepared for state examinations,” he said.

Delhi health minister Satyendar Jain, on the other hand, said the exam should be implemented from this year itself. Deferring it would be in favour of private medical institutes,” he said.

A day before the meeting on Sunday, Nadda said that the ministry was hoping to find a solution to address the concerns of lakhs of medical aspirants and their parents.