Reports of widespread cheating, favouritism and swindles in NEET-UG 2024 have generated the first storm of the new Parliament convened on June 24. That’s bad news for the weakened BJP/NDA 3.0 government, and especially for re-inducted Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan – writes Summiya Yasmeen With evidence emerging on a daily basis that there was widespread cheating and bribery in the NEET-UG (National Eligibility-cum-Entrance-Test-Undergraduate) 2024 examination written by 2.4 million school-leavers aspiring for admission into medical colleges countrywide, the newly sworn-in BJP/Modi government at the Centre has got off to a shaky start. Coincidently results of NEET-UG — a centralised national exam for aspirant medical practitioners introduced in 2016 — were announced on the very day (June 4) that General Election 2024 results were declared by the Election Commission of India. In the recently concluded General Election, upending all expectation and opinion poll forecasts, the ruling BJP was cut to size with its 303 seats in the Lok Sabha reduced to 240. Although together with its NDA (National Democratic Alliance) allies it bagged 293 seats in the 543-strong Lok Sabha, the BJP with prime minister Narendra Modi at the helm has formed the BJP/NDA 3.0 government at the Centre, reports of widespread cheating, question paper leaks and swindles in NEET-UG 2024 have generated the first storm of the new Parliament convened on June 24. That’s bad news for the weakened BJP/NDA government and especially for Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who has been re-inducted into Shastri Bhavan, Delhi. The embarrassment suffered by the new BJP/NDA government at the Centre is likely to be serious because the decision to replace medical college entrance exams hitherto administered by state governments with a common national exam — (NEET-UG) — for admission into all 706 medical colleges countrywide was of the BJP/NDA 2.0 government in 2016. The rationale of NEET-UG advanced at the time — endorsed by the Supreme Court — was that it saves students the expense, time and inconvenience of having to write multiple entrance exams of state governments in the hope of bagging a prized seat in a highly-subsidised government-promoted medical college. In 2017, a National Testing Agency (NTA) was established to conduct NEET-UG and several other national entrance exams including IIT-JEE, UGC-NET among others. However according to some educationists, NTA was established hurriedly without due care and diligence to create well-paid “jobs for the boys”, i.e, ideologically aligned party sympathisers. This is substantiated by NTA suffering embarrassment ab initio for glitches while conducting national examinations written by thousands of students clamouring for admission into the country’s much-too-few acceptable quality higher education institutions. In NEET-UG 2020 it incorrectly declared a student in Madhya Pradesh had scored only 6 marks in the exam, an egregious error that drove her to suicide. Later, NTA issued a clarification that she had scored 590, provoking a huge public outcry. In 2022, NTA was widely criticised for mismanagement of the IIT-JEE (Main) 2022 examination during which “technical issues” resulted in abnormally low scores for many students.…
