Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai) The DMK government of Tamil Nadu is determined to shift education from the concurrent list of the Constitution — which means that both the Central and state governments can enact legislation on education — to the state list. During his Independence Day address in Chennai, chief minister M.K. Stalin said: “Moving education to the state list from the concurrent list of the Constitution is the way forward to scrap the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET)” — the national test which determines admission into all medical colleges (703) countrywide, including public and private medical colleges in Tamil Nadu (pop.68 million). Chief minister Stalin’s remarks came on the back of heart-rending tragedies of a teen and his father, who took their own lives in August, which have shaken the state. The teenager, S. Jagadeeshwaran took his own life on August 12, after he failed to clear NEET. The student’s father, P. Selvasekar committed suicide a day later, unable to bear the loss of his son. Following consistent reports that liberal marking of class XII school-leaving exam papers by the country’s 31 state exam boards were giving their students an advantage over students writing national CBSE, CISCE school-leaving exams and getting relatively easy admission into medical colleges and Central universities, over the past few years, the BJP government has been decreeing common national entrance exams on the highly successful IIT and IIM models. The objective is to provide a “level playing field” for all school leavers. Thus in 2016, the Central government mandated NEET — a common entrance exam — whose toppers in descending order get to choose medical colleges of their choice nationwide. Similarly in May this year, the Union education ministry introduced CUET (Common University Entrance Test) for determining admission into 47 Central government universities. Centralisation of admission into India’s much-too-few institutions of near-global standards (IITs, IIMs, Central universities) has been a sore point with several state governments objecting to national common entrance tests on the ground that test papers are set to standards/syllabi prescribed by the national CBSE and CISCE exam boards which placed students graduating from state boards at a disadvantage, especially when writing NEET. Tamil Nadu’s call to bring education under the state list is not new. On earlier occasions too, the state has demanded transfer of education to exclusively state subjects listed in Seventh Schedule under Article 246 of the Constitution as in the original Constitution document. Only during the height of Emergency declared by prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, when most opposition party members were in jail and Parliament was in disarray, was education transferred to concurrent list. This controversy has elicited mixed response from academics in Tamil Nadu. ATB Bose, general secretary of the Association of Managements of Private Schools of Tamil Nadu, believes education should remain in the concurrent list in the interests of national integration and prevalence of acceptable standards of primary-secondary education countrywide. “As stipulated in NCF-SE 2023 in core subjects — languages, mathematics, science, vocational education…
