The Supreme Court’s recent directive to the Govt to meticulously address any lapses in the NEET examination underscores the critical nature of the fiasco

Plans do go awry. Who could say this better than Modi Sarkar 3.0? Prime Minister Narendra Modi had planned a blitzkrieg of the first 100 days of good governance. It doesn’t seem to be happening as of now. First the number of BJP members elected to Lok Sabha did not sufficiently pile up, forcing a toned-down deportment of the Government.

Worse has been the marks manipulation controversy generated around the results declared by National Testing Agency (NTA) of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for admission to the undergraduate courses in the medical colleges across the country. The Supreme Court on June 18 told the Union Government and the NTA to ensure that even ‘0.001 per cent negligence’ in conducting the NEET-UG 2024 exams be looked into with all seriousness considering the immense labour that the candidates have put in for preparing the nationwide examination.

Thankfully, we have a mature leader like Dharmendra Pradhan as Union Education Minister, who is expected to steer through the crisis and not a Smriti Irani or a Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank camping at the Shastri Bhawan, the seat of the Ministry of Education. Pradhan has so far shown the patience and perseverance in handling this gargantuan-like crisis.

The mess around NEET is much deeper than just the alleged malpractice in the conduct of the examination and the manipulation of marks. It’s a question of the very high financial and emotional stakes involved, given the limited number of the seats available in the medical colleges.

Over 15 lakh students appear for the NEET annually to fight over about 83,000 seats available. Less than half of these seats are available in the Government-run colleges. More than half of the seats in these colleges are allotted under various quotas. Thus, many deserving candidates are unable to secure admission to Government colleges.

The fees in the private medical colleges in India are unbelievably expensive, often touching Rs one crore for the entire course. For middle-class families, these costs are untenable, prompting them to look for more affordable options abroad.

Thus the medical college market in countries like China, Ukraine, Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Here the cost of education at the best is less than half of what the private medical colleges charge. No wonder if there is COVID happening in China, war happening in central Asia or hooliganism in Kyrgyzstan, miserable State of the Indian students makes news.

The problems of these students don’t end here. Even on the successful completion of the course, an uncertain future awaits them. The medical degrees obtained from foreign universities must be recognised by the National Medical Commission of India (NMCI). Even if the college is recognised, the medical graduates need to clear the Foreign Medical Graduates Examination (FMGE) conducted by NMCI to practice in India. The pass rate for FMGE is relatively low.

This shortage of seats explains the repeated noise of corruption around the medical entrance tests for several years now. The most prominent among the many fallouts of this situation are higher prices, long wait times and increased competition for the limited available resources.

When shortage occurs, an environment is created where individuals or stakeholders may be willing to pay bribes to secure access to the limited resources.

Today, in the NEET eco-system, there aren’t just the students and testing agencies who are participating. It can be safely said that the financial stakes at this examination is much higher for the horde of coaching centres and admission counsellors than the students themselves.

Then there are the people who manipulate the system to make entrance into an Indian college ‘convenient’ lest the candidate ends up selling family silver for an admission in a private college in India or go through the rigmarole of enrolling in a foreign medical college and face an uncertain future.

The expected role of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan in the current crisis would be to provide an immediate relief to the injury and pain caused to the lakhs of students by the NTA, which conducted NEET 2024. The larger relief would only come by investment in the health infrastructure sector.

Increasing the number of medical seats in Government and private colleges, in the higher numbers in the former category, would lessen the need for students to seek education abroad or the manipulators having a field day. This requires substantial investment in medical infrastructure and faculty.

This would not come by the mere initiative of either Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan or the newly-appointed Health Minister JP Nadda. There has to be a Government vision and more importantly the political will to break the cartel of the private medical colleges.

The management of these colleges maintains a Octopus-like stranglehold over the medical education system through its various arms like the coaching centres and the counsellors. The ‘costly’ admission process is the first step towards the crass commercialisation of the medical sector in this country. About it on some other day.

(The writer is author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice, views are personal)