Jayalalithaa urges PM to drop proposal to reintroduce common medical entrance test

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J.Jayalalithaa on Monday urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to drop a Central Government proposal to reintroduce the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET).

Welcoming a recent Supreme Court ruling that quashed the test for undergraduate and post graduate medical and dental courses, Jayalalithaa said in her letter to Prime Minister Singh that a solution had finally been arrived at to a "long pending and vexatious issue".

She added that now she hoped undergraduate and post-graduate students would not have to go through the 'agony of an uncertain selection process which militated against their interest and the interests of Tamil Nadu'.

She also said that a statement by Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad indicating that the Centre may move the Supreme Court for a review of the judgement has "created confusion and frustration in the minds of thousands of students of Tamil Nadu who have already been covered by a fair and transparent admission policy laid down by the Government of Tamil Nadu which has been working well."

Jayalalithaa said that the Tamil Nadu government had taken a number of deliberative steps from 2005, culminating in abolition of the Common Entrance Exam for professional under graduate courses in the state.

"The introduction of a Common Entrance Test such as NEET would have created confusion and a plethora of litigations and confounded the smooth implementation of this reservation policy, both in undergraduate and post-graduate medical and dental admissions in Tamil Nadu," she added.

test, which did not have such enabling provisions," she said.

She concluded by saying that the "national test would be out of tune with the prevailing socio-economic milieu and administrative requirements of Tamil Nadu.