Tamil Nadu: Tragic outcome of political shenanigans

The tragic suicide of 17-year-old Anitha, an aspiring medical student from a Dalit family in rural Tamil Nadu (pop.72.1 million) on September 1, has sent shockwaves across the country and sparked huge protests by several political parties, college students and activists in the state. Anitha’s tragedy was that she averaged 98 percent in the class XII school-leaving exam of the Tamil Nadu State Board of School Education (TNSBSE). Despite this impressive performance she was unable to secure a medical college seat due to her poor score (86/720) in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) 2017, which as per a Supreme Court decree of April 11, 2016 is the sole common entrance exam for admission into all medical and dental colleges countrywide.  Anitha took the extreme step on August 22, nine days after the Supreme Court declined to exempt Tamil Nadu from applicability of NEET for admission into the state’s medical colleges, and ordered the state government to begin medical admissions according to the NEET merit list. The August 22 order dashed Anitha’s hopes of securing admission into all medical colleges including medical colleges in Tamil Nadu despite her high class XII marks, which was the basis for admission into all professional education colleges in the state since 2007. In 2006, the late Jayalalithaa-led All India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) government abolished all common entrance exams for professional education institutions and decreed class XII scores as the basis for admission, reportedly to afford equal opportunity to rural school leavers. Throughout the past academic year, the successor AIADMK government has been making desperate political manoeuvres to get Tamil Nadu students exemption from NEET. On February 1, the state legislative assembly passed two Bills to exempt Tamil Nadu students from writing NEET, but the Bills failed to get presidential approval.  Moreover, immediately after NEET 2017 results were declared on June 23, the AIADMK government issued an order stating that after surrendering the mandatory 15 percent of government medical seats in medical colleges in the state to the all-India pool, 85 percent of the remaining seats in Tamil Nadu’s 22 government and ten private medical colleges and four government and 21 private dental colleges will be reserved for class XII graduates of schools affiliated with TNSBSE, out of which 15 percent were reserved for students of CBSE, CISCE and other pan-India exam boards. The objective of the government order was to ensure that TNSBSE students who fared poorly in NEET 2017, compared to students from CBSE and other boards, wouldn’t be shut out of the state’s medical and dental colleges. However, the government order failed to withstand legal scrutiny and after a single judge of the Madras high court struck down the order on July 14, a division bench upheld its decision.  Educationists and analysts in Coimbatore squarely blame the AIADMK government for misleading medical college aspirants like Anitha into believing that Tamil Nadu students would be exempted from NEET. Moreover, they find it specially tragic that the gutsy Anitha who had appealed…