Tamil Nadu Congress Committee president K.S. Alagiri on Tuesday criticised Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami for stating in the Assembly that the Congress and DMK were responsible for implementing the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) in Tamil Nadu.
“This is an attempt to defame the UPA II government in which the Congress and DMK were together,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. NEET was implemented in Tamil Nadu only after 2016, he pointed out and rejected the criticism that the exam was being implemented since 2009.
Explaining his point, Mr. Alagiri said that Simran, Jain and others had filed a case in the Supreme Court in 2009 stating that around 35 entrance examinations were being conducted for admissions into 425 medical colleges in the country. In December 2010, the Supreme Court directed the Medical Council of India to organise a single all-India exam for medical admissions. However, since the Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Kalaignar opposed it, the plan was dropped, he recalled.
In this background, more than 80 cases were filed in 2013 in the Supreme Court asking for NEET to be scrapped. A three-judge bench said that the Medical Council of India has no right to conduct an examination. Since the Medical Council was an independent body, it appealed against the verdict despite the recommendations of the Union Health Ministry and in April 2016, the Supreme Court said that NEET could be conducted from April 2016. “In this case, the BJP government supported this move. The AIADMK is trying to obfuscate the facts,” he said.
Mr. Alagiri underlined that NEET was not implemented until 2014 when the UPA was in power and that only the BJP-led NDA had passed a law in Parliament to conduct NEET. “BJP is the main reason why NEET is being held in all States. Who is responsible for the deaths of young students beginning from Anitha to Jothi Sri Durga, Motilal and Adithya in the last three years? The AIADMK and BJP should be held responsible. These are not suicides, but murders, due to the wrong approach. AIADMK is the first guilty party,” he said.
Mr. Alagiri said that the AIADMK government could neither stop NEET from being implemented nor could it prepare the students to perform well in the exam. “The people of Tamil Nadu are not going to pardon the AIADMK government easily,” he said.
