Why Do Indian Students Prefer Ukraine? Problems Of NEET

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The News

Karnataka’s Naveen Shekarappa Gyanagoudar went to Ukraine to study medicine and died from Russian shelling this week while waiting to buy food.
His father, Shekarappa, has said that Naveen was forced to go to Kharkiv to study medicine because he was not able to secure admission in India due to lack of money and caste-wise allocation of seats in Indian medical colleges.
He also said that his son was bright & had secured 97 per cent in his board exams.

Karnataka has 9,445 undergraduate medical seats of the total 84,649 in the country.
It accounts for more than 11% of the country’s medical seats, but NEET had made these seats unavailable to meritorious students from the State itself.

Naveen’s father Shekarappa primarily said three things about Medical education in India:

Naveen performed well in his Class XII exams. Despite scoring 97 per cent in PUC, he could not secure a medical seat in India.
To get a medical seat, one has to spend crores of rupees, whereas education abroad in Ukraine costs less.
Medical seats are being allotted on the basis of caste.

Before NEET (UG) was implemented nationwide in 2013 (Later in 2016), states conducted their own entrance tests, there was AIPMT for all India colleges and some prestigious medical colleges like AIIMS, JIPMER, KMC Manipal, CMC Vellore etc conducted their own entrance exams.
National Testing Agency (NTA) is the nodal agency to conduct all India competitive exams and conducts NEET (UG) since 2019.
The Central Board of Secondary Education conducted NEET between 2013 and 2018 before the setting of NTA.

Naveen got 97% marks in his XII
- Incidentally, marks obtained in twelfth grade are not considered for NEET ranking. Even if someone gets the highest marks in school, there is no guarantee that he or she will get admission to a medical college.
- As Naveen passed from the Karnataka state board, he was in an even more disadvantageous position.
- NEET is an all-India examination and its syllabus is based on the CBSE curriculum.

The disparity of results among state & CBSE stdents was highlighted by Justice AK Rajan committee constituted by the Tamil Nadu government to study the effects of NEET.
The panel showed that after the introduction of NEET, the success rate of students from CBSE board jumped 38.84 per cent, which was earlier only 0.9 per cent.
At the same time, the success rate of state board students went down from 98.23 per cent to 59.41 per cent.
Note: No data from Karnataka is available. There is a need of such a study in Karnataka.

The Proliferation of Coaching
- NEET has been designed on the basis of the CBSE curriculum and that is one of the reasons for the proliferation of coaching centres.
  - According to the Rajan Panel, 99 per cent of the students who secured admission received some or other form of coaching.
  - In the list of successful candidates, the proportion of students from English medium schools has also increased.
  - Another important finding is that the chances of getting a seat on the first attempt are decreasing drastically.
    - In 2013, 99.29 per cent of students cleared the exam in their first attempt. In 2021, only 28.58 per cent of students got seats in their first attempt.

Naveen’s Father also alleged that one needs more than a crore to pursue Medical education
- The role of money in getting medical education manifests itself in the fee structure of private colleges. The private colleges can charge anything in the range of Rs 1 to 1.5 crore as tuition fee. When NEET-UG was imposed by the Supreme Court, 90 per cent private colleges rose fee by at least 600 per cent.
- To keep the fee high and fill up seats, the qualifying marks for NEET are artificially kept low so that almost everyone can bid for private seats.
- In 2021 NEET-UG, 15.44 lakh candidates appeared and 8.7 lakh cleared the exam. This was because the qualifying cut off was kept as low as 138 out of a possible 720 marks for the general category.

Past MBBS admission trends through NEET-UG cut-offs reveal how students with low ranks have ended up getting admissions in private colleges while those with better ranks have been pushed out of the system being unable to afford private MBBS education which could cost anywhere up to Rs 30 to 40 lakh a year with the cost of NRI seats exceeding even these limits in some institutions.

Lets not get into this debate…!!!

In NEET 2021, more than 83% OBC candidates, more than 80% of the SC candidates and more than 77% of ST candidates have scored more than the 50th percentile cut-off meant for the ‘General’ category.
In absolute terms, in the list of those who cleared the threshold for the unreserved candidate (50^th Percentile cutoff), 4.52 lakh were from OBC, SC or ST groups & 3.18 lakh from general category and EWS.
In a nutshell…

1. Scrap NEET & go back to State entrance??
or
2. Address the problems around NEET

Medical education in India is in need of a complete makeover. Naveen’s death and Indian students who are trapped in the Ukraine crisis is a much-needed wake-up call.