Bengal medical aspirants write to Prez over NEET

Some medical aspirants from Bengal wrote to the President of India while five senior doctors from across the country have written to the Prime Minister urging their intervention to stop the implementation of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) thereby allowing the state governments to conduct their own medical entrance examination to avoid any further complications after the Madras high court's stayed the order on the proceedings of NEET 2017.

The doctors who have sought the attention of the Prime Minister, pointed out a serious issue as the delay in NEET proceedings may affect the health services in the country as the timing of passing out of doctors will be deferred. As a result of this, there may be a shortage of interns in various hospitals. This would have an adverse effect on the health services in the states.

In their letters to Prime Minister Narendra Modi — Dr Amiya Kumar Maity, Dr Shankhadip Mula, Dr Imtiaz Ali, Dr Priyanka Maity and Dr Jahangir Alam — requested him to issue an order so that the state entrance boards can take their own entrance examinations for the session 2017-18 as the last year and the CBSE board can take the examination for 15 percent All India Quota & Private Medical Colleges seats. They said that the NEET may be started later with appropriate regulations and arrangements.

They pointed out how the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) which was assigned to conduct the NEET has made some mistakes in the question papers in various languages. It may be mentioned here that the Madras high court (Madurai Bench) already put a stay order on the NEET proceedings over certain issues.

It has been alleged by the NEET aspirants that questions of all regional languages like Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada and Odia were totally different from that of English and Hindi question papers. Even the question papers were tougher than the English and Hindi ones.

The doctors in their letter said that the CBSE board published information bulletin saying that only one unique question paper will be set for NEET (UG) 2017 examination in different regional languages but on the day of examination, it was found that question papers were different in various languages. Moreover, regional language students had been instructed that the question in English will be the final in case of any doubt regarding a question in any regional language. The CBSE board announced that it would not take any responsibility for the mistakes in translation from English to regional languages.