Expert Talk: 'NEET will affect Tamil-medium students the most'

The Justice AK Rajan Committee’s 165-page report on the impact of NEET was made public on Monday (September 20). The report stated that NEET should be scrapped immediately.

“If NEET continues for a few more years, the health care system of Tamil Nadu will be very badly affected. There may not be enough doctors being posted at various primary health centres. There may not be enough expert doctors for being employed in the government hospitals,” the report says.

According to the report, the aspirations of rural students, especially from the Tamil medium of instruction, took a big hit post-NEET. It showed that in both government and self-financed colleges, far fewer rural students secured admissions than their urban counterparts compared to the pre-NEET period.

Speaking to The Federal, Dr Sumanth Raman, political analyst, doctor and healthcare IT professional, said: “The problem is with the outlier year of 2017, which was the first year of introduction of NEET and if we remove the outlier data (a normal practice in data analysis), the analysis shows that students of Tamil Nadu have adjusted to the new normal.”

The problem is, in fact, for students from Tamil medium and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, he said. There is a need to exclude the “creamy layer” so that students from poor backgrounds stand a better chance of admission in medical colleges, he said.

“Creamy layer” is a term used in Indian politics to refer to some members of a backward class who are highly advanced socially as well as economically and educationally.