The entrances and something beyond reach: I Lack a stand for now!

REDKP

6-Feb-2022

I was peacefully doing M-blogs, but I wanted to take a break from movies and come back to what I was doing previously. This week there was a controversy related to NEET in Tamil Nadu (Very usual; it happens every other week), so in no means, I would discuss it.

In India, at least 60 odd entrance exams are being conducted after the 12th grade. But in the last five years or so, the most popular and controversial exam has been NEET.

NEET [National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) or NEET (UG)] is an all-India pre-medical entrance test for students who wish to pursue undergraduate medical (MBBS), dental (BDS) and AYUSH (BAMS, BUMS, BHMS, etc.) courses in government and private institutions in India and also for those intending to pursue primary medical qualification abroad.

I fondly remember when this exam was first conducted in 2016. As a 7th-grade student, I set out on 1 May 2016 to understand how the atmosphere of the centre was on that date (That centre was my own school, K.V.D.R.D.O. in Bangalore). While the visibly stressed aspirants were skimming through their books, with a good number of them being Class 11 and 12 Biology books and no real idea as to what they were signing up for, I saw so many coaching institution representatives standing in front of the centre.

So, I went to every other representative who was distributing their institutions their pamphlets and asked them to give me a pamphlet (Well, to get these pamphlets, these representatives questioned me, looking at my height and relatively younger, kid-like look, so I had to counter them in the name of a non-existent brother (Typical Spy Stuff). What I observed in these pamphlets was very similar, claiming they are the best in the market for an exam that was just witnessing its inception at that point. (A general observation)

So, coming to the point, whether NEET is a boon or bane can be debated later, but I would like to present a case study of a girl. Shanmugam Anitha (5 March 2000 – 1 September 2017) was a student from Tamil Nadu, India. She scored 1176/1200 ( Which is 98% by the way) in the 12th standard exams in the Tamil Nadu State Board. This would have secured her a medical seat if only the State Board marks had been considered for admission to medical colleges. However, in NEET-UG 2017, Anitha secured 12.33 per cent of marks, scoring 86 out of 720 marks.

The minimum eligibility cut-off for making it into the merit list was 40 per cent for students in the reserved category. On 1 September 2017, she committed suicide by hanging. Her death created a major controversy in Tamil Nadu where the National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET) for medical admissions was strongly opposed. She has become a cause celebre as a victim of the system.

Anitha belonged to a poor Tamil family in Kuzhumur village, Ariyalur district in rural Tamil Nadu. Anitha was the daughter of a daily wage labourer, and her mother had died when she was young. She was brought up by her grandmother and lived in a house without even a toilet. She studied in a Tamil Medium school and was amongst the toppers in her district, and she was the only student in Ariyalur district to score 100% marks in Physics and Mathematics (it's still been a dream to score tons in these subjects at least once before my school life ends, but that ain't happening though) in the 12th standard board examination.

Anitha always wanted to become a doctor. She saw that poor rural students couldn't afford the expensive coaching needed to prepare for NEET exams, and only if medical admission selections were done based on the 12th standard marks alone would rural students be able to get seats. Anitha was unable to meet the cutoff and secure a seat through NEET. Though Anitha was offered an aeronautical engineering course seat at the Madras Institute of Technology, as she only wanted to be a doctor, she did not take up the offer. She would have been the first from her community in her village to become a doctor, of course if not for NEET.

Anitha secured 98% in the board exams. [Anyway and any day I could only dream of an overall of 98% in my boards, though I do differ with boards being a determinant of a person's skills; denying a seat to someone of this calibre and dedication was the nation's loss and not actually her loss. Neither is every topper skilful nor is every skilful person a topper (while I might be writing this from my own privileges, honestly)]. But unfortunately, she couldn't get the NEET rank, but what if she accepted MIT's offer? Maybe Anitha, in some way or the other, made this nation proud.

But her suicide did impact me personally. I was an 8th grader in 2017-18. During my final exam that year, in the subject of Hindi, I had a question where I was asked how to dream of an India of your conscience (Just a Typical KV School Question Paper with a Typical Value Based Question). I replied to that question, where one of my pointers was that I dreamt of an India where I don't find brothers' and sisters' suicides due to failure in an exam (I do not know how my teacher reacted to reading that point and how many marks I was awarded for that question). But my point was never the reality; instead, the trend has increased as the years passed. The stats are quite depressing to be displayed. KOTA has been a factory in itself for years now. While reading about Anitha, I questioned myself about the privileges I have got in this nation.

I have no shame accpeting that was born and live with a silver spoon, while many of my age during the pandemic lacked formal or informal education, food and fodder and the visuals of people walking back to their respective destinations; the way people lost their lives during the COVID-19 second wave just made me question my conscience as to I have justified the facilities I got during this COVID-19-related lockdown. The date 25th May 2021 was the day of relevance for me as Politicho-d-company was started on that day when I published my first blog, which I would call a micro-step to give back to the learnings of my life. I will be quite active in these activities. I have not even earned a penny yet from blogging, but that's not my ultimate aim either.

Now I am very clear about the fact that I don't have a clear stand as of now on this issue, as I lack an idea about the way the questions are been framed in the NEET question paper's and I am not that mature enough to directly make a preconceived stand on this issue as I need a bit more detailed understanding on the perspectives, so consider I am out for now!