Supreme Court wrong to reject common test
The Supreme Court's 2:1 decision to quash the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test to medical colleges goes against the interests of the student community. With the apex court declaring the test to be unconstitutional, aspiring medical students will have to go back to taking multiple entrance examinations. This is undesirable for several reasons. First, it means there will be more forms to fill, more money to be paid in application fees even as students travel all over the country to take different examinations. This is an expensive and time-consuming process that discriminates against those from weaker socio-economic backgrounds. Second, after the tests have been taken, students who crack more than one examination block several seats till the last moment, at the cost of others. These seats are later sold at a premium by private medical colleges, again causing disadvantage to poor students. Third, NEET sought to ensure greater transparency in the medical education system since all aspirants would have to take the same examination administered by the Medical Council of India. But now there is no telling how private medical colleges, who are known to have ‘sold' seats on a free-market basis, will admit their students. Finally, because NEET covered all medical colleges, it gave students access to the entire pool of medical seats available through just one examination. Now, students will be back to taking more number of examinations to compete for fewer seats through an opaque process.
At the crux of the apex court's judgement is the assessment that NEET, administered by the Medical Council of India, impinges on the rights of private colleges and minority institutions (especially those which receive no Government aid) to decide on their individual admission processes. This unfettered right to admit students without state interference, as a corollary of the constitutional right to establish and administer institutions, was first endorsed by an 11-judge Bench of the Supreme Court in the 2002 TMA Pai Foundation case. In effect, it ties an institution's administrative ‘autonomy' to Government aid, thereby making it difficult to have any kind of control over such private or minority-run institutions. Also, such institutions, in a bid to retain their ‘autonomy', pass on the cost burden to the students, with students paying huge sums for a degree that may not even be recognised.
According to the apex court, NEET also failed on two other legal grounds. One, it compromised the States’ constitutional freedom, as education is a Concurrent list subject. The common test, State regimes said, made it difficult to implement State-specific reservation policies — an argument also reiterated by the minority institutions. But this is a specious contention as both States and minority institutions could have had their pick from the national pool of eligible students. Finally, the Supreme Court also decided that NEET went beyond the mandate of the Medical Council of India. It ruled that the MCI only had the authority to set “minimum standards in medical education” and that the entrance examination did not fall within that ambit. The Government must contest this ruling, both on legal grounds and in the students’ interests.