State may face challenge in selecting successful candidates on time

As there has been a considerable amount of delay in taking the decision whether the state level entrance would take place or the successful medical candidates would be selected through the national level single entrance examinations — National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET). After being in a fix for many days the State government finally got the copy of the Centre’s ordinance allowing it to hold the state medical entrance examination. 

Now it remains to be seen how the senior officials from the state health department and the West Bengal Joint Entrance Examination (WBJEE) Board handle the situation and face the challenges that are being posed due to the delay in the process of conducting examinations. 

In every year the state government holds the medical entrance examination in the middle of April, the result of which is declared within June 5. But this year the health department and WBJEE Board are yet to fix the date of examination as they got the clearance for holding the exam on last Tuesday.  They are planning to hold the medical exam in the third week of June. 

But according to the Supreme Court order and the Medical Council of India (MCI) guideline all the admission of successful candidates in various undergraduate medical courses are to be completed by September 30. 

If the state conducts the examination even in the third week of June it would be difficult task to smoothly conduct the examinations of more than 65,000 odd medical aspirants in the state, publish the result and admit the successful candidates within September 30. 

Every year result gets published within June 5 as the WBJEE Board gets a time of more than three-and-half months to conduct the admission processes through various counseling. 

After the completion of the examination in the middle of April it takes nearly two months to publish the result. If the board takes nearly two months time to publish the result this year it would be difficult to conduct the counseling in the remaining one month time. 

An expert said it was nearly impossible to carry out all the counseling and admit the candidates at all the medical colleges within one month time. There will be lot of mistakes. Even the state cannot go beyond September 30 for which they have to seek permission from the Supreme Court. 

Experts say that if the state government had conducted the medical entrance examinations along with that of the engineering and B.Pharm on 17 May it would have been better for the government to manage the situation smoothly and would have got more time to conduct the counselling. 

It may be mentioned that various other states without waiting for the final decision held their own state level examinations but West Bengal waited for the final decision to come out. 

Though, the senior health officials are optimistic that they will be able to complete the processes of examination and admission within the stipulated time.