In a letter to Rajya Sabha, Minister of State Health and Family Welfare, Ashwini Kumar Choubey appreciated the medical entrance examination- NEET and quoted "NEET-National Eligibility and Entrance Examination has resulted in ensuring better and minimum standards of medical education curbing malpractices in medical admission."
Here is All You Need to Know About NEET 2018
He further said that using NEET as an entrance examination for admission to medical courses in the country has led to increased and greater transparency and reduced the burden on the prospective students of appearing in the multiple entrance exams.
The Minister told in the upper house that, "Section 10D of the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956 prescribes conducting a uniform entrance examination which is named as National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) for seeking admission to all the medical educational institutes at undergraduate and post-graduate level"
Informing the parliament furthermore the minister said, "Without the exemption of any state from conducting the examination, the provision of the IMC Act, 1956 for conducting NEET applies across country."
The Graduate Medical Education Regulations, 1997 and Post graduate Medical Education Regulations, 2000 have also been amended to provide common counseling for seeking admission to medical courses, making the entire admission process transparent and on the basis of merit. This further ensures minimal chance of malpractices being included in the admission process.
As told to the Parliament by the Minister last week, there are only 437 vacant seats in the MBBS course for the academic year 2017-18. He also said that it is not allowed to fill up the vacant seats from NEET qualifiers till the time NEET 2018 is held and the results are out because the process of admission to the medical courses through a common counseling session is to be accomplished with the statutory time schedule which states that no admission is allowed after August 31.
The examination process of NEET has witnessed a number of controversies in the last days which includes the court cases over setting difficult question papers for vernacular language students and protests, especially Tamil Nadu state for being exempted from the national level exam and cases regarding the changed eligibility criteria for the exam.
In its third year of operations, NEET will be conducted on 6th May, 2018. NEET 2018 will be conducted with an aim to seek admissions in MBBS/BDS courses for all available seats of MBBS/BDS across the country excluding two institutes namely: AIIMS and JIPMER Puducherry.
It is stated that the NEET 2018 examination will have a question paper in a set of 11 different languages including: Hindi, English, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Urdu, Odiya, Assamese, Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada. The exam is being conducted in 11 languages to make it easy for the aspirants from different states to take the examination.
