Poor standard of state board edu is sole reason: G Viswanathan

The students' agitation against Neet may be justified from their point of view, but the true tragedy is that their parents did not bother all these years to notice the failure on the part of successive governments to upgrade the school syllabus on par with the systems elsewhere in the country and the CBSE. The poor standard of the State Board education in TN is the sole reason for the state having to crawl before the Centre with a begging bowl pleading for Neet exemption for its students.

I have been crying from the rooftop all these years about this but nobody paid attention. I am glad that at least now, the education minister (K.A. Sengottaiyan) has taken upon himself the task of upgrading the syllabus and has set up a committee. The minister will have to train the teachers also to cope with the improved syllabus; the present crop of teachers are unsuited for that task.

While the students in most other states had the benefit of a good education system, plus the tuition classes to prepare for the Neet, our students mostly had neither. To turn the calendar back a bit, when our school syllabus was revised last and the DMK government introduced Samacheer Kalvi (common syllabus) integrating the Matriculation, Anglo-Indian and State Board syllabi in 2010, following the Muthukumaran Committee report, the administrators thought it fit to downgrade the syllabus arguing that it would help the rural students, instead of upgrading it as they feared students would run away from a tough syllabus and that would hurt the state's enrolment figures (we now boast of a GR, gross enrolment ratio, of over 99 per cent at primary entry level and 44.8 per cent at college entry level as against the national average of 23.6 per cent).

Even at that time, there was a difference of opinion as some argued that if our school education level was up to the CBSE, our students would be able to compete in the All-India examinations, but somehow their views were not accepted. Samacheer Kalvi happened. 

The government changed and the new AIADMK regime led by Jayalalithaa decided to postpone Samacheer implementation and wanted to upgrade the syllabus. A PIL in the Madras High Court resulted in the court ruling against the government move. The matter went to the Supreme Court where a three-member Bench confirmed the HC order and directed that Samacheer Kalvi should be brought back in ten days time. This is still going on.

All of us-students, parents and teachers-know that Samacheer Kalvi is not up to the mark because instead of leveling up, they had leveled down. Even Matriculation (syllabus) would have been better as it's better than Samacheer Kalvi even while being somewhat lesser in quality compared to the CBSE. And we have seen that even in TN, those who studied in CBSE were able to fare far better (than the state board) in the Neet this year. 

Take the cases of Chennai and Namakkal. Chennai with 52 lakh population got 471 seats this year as aga-inst just 113 last year (when admissions were based on plus-two marks and Neet was exempted), whereas Namakkal with 19 lakh population got 109 seats this year as against 957 last year. The Namakkal schools are known to push rote system of learning, turning students into mugging machines; they would even skip the 11th standard syllabus and start preparing for the plus-two exams straightaway after the 10th to gallop ahead; but this year, with Neet upon them, these students were forced to face the real testing of skills beyond just the rote.

And we have our own experience of conducting entrance examination at the VIT every year, from 2003 onwards. In fact, about 2.22 lakh students took our exam this year and we found Tamil Nadu students did not do well, except for those from urban areas and the CBSE stream.

Back to Neet, the Centre gave TN exemption last year but we wanted it this year too. The Assembly passed a resolution. But the Centre kept it pending and by then, state came up with another announcement saying 85 per cent of medical seats would be given to students from state board. Not many would have taken that seriously as that order was unlikely to pass through judicial scrutiny; but when Union Minister Nirmala Sitaraman said the Centre would support if the state came up with an ordinance for a year's NEET exemption, alarm bells rang for the students who had got through NEET. They moved the Supreme Court, which stayed medical admissions and issued notices to the Centre and the TN government to come up with formulae to protect the interests of the state board and the NEET-qualified students. At the next hearing on August 22, the Centre informed the SC that it would not grant any exemption to TN students and the court dismissed the petition. While the NEET-qualified students celebrated, the others felt shattered, angry. Among them was Anitha, who had impleaded herself against NEET in that SC case. She returned from Delhi in tears. You know the rest.