Updated: September 4, 2020 3:40:15 pm
Members of the TMC student wing held a protest in Kolkata last week against the timing of the JEE and NEET exams. (Express photo by Partha Paul)
NEET, JEE 2020 exams: On Friday, the Supreme Court dismissed a petition for review of six opposition-ruled states against their Order of August 17 that allows the completion of entrance exams to NEET (UG) and JEE (Mains) in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Six ministers from Maharashtra, Punjab, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh had moved the apex court saying that if the order is not reviewed, “serious and irreparable damage and injuries will fall on the student community.”
In its order of August 17, the superior court, which rejected the request for further postponement of the examinations, had declared that “life cannot be stopped” and that “the career of the students cannot be jeopardized.” Read the story in Malayalam
Initially, the JEE (main) was supposed to be held from April 7-11. Due to the pandemic, it was first postponed to July 18-23 and then rescheduled for September 1-6. The JEE (Advanced) will be held on September 27. The National Entrance and Eligibility Exam (NEET), for admission to undergraduate medical programs, would take place on May 3. It was first postponed to July 26 and then to September. 13.
The petitioners in the case were Moloy Ghatak (Minister of West Bengal), Rameshwar Oraon (Jharkhand), Raghu Sharma (Rajasthan), Amarjeet Bhagat (Chhattisgarh), Balbir Singh Sidhu (Punjab) and Uday Ravindra Samant (Maharashtra). The petitioners had stated, in their plea for review, “not only will the health, well-being, and safety of students / candidates taking the NEET / JEE exams be in jeopardy, but public health in general will also be in jeopardy. grave danger … “
While there are 660 test centers for JEE, approximately 1,443 students per center, there are 3,843 centers for NEET, or approximately 415 students per center, the petitioners noted. “Such a large movement of people will ipso facto prove to be a serious health hazard and will completely defeat the twin solutions we have today to combat Covid-19, that is, social distancing and the avoidance of large public gatherings.” They had said while urging the court to postpone the entrance exams.
In one situation, the review plea had stated, “where there is absolutely no classroom teaching, the Union Government’s decision to conduct examinations on such a massive scale reveals the non-application of the mind and is an exercise of power. unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious. “
The six ministers had stated that the Center had “sufficient time to make full preparations” for the safe and successful conduct of the examinations. “However,” they had argued, “the intervening months from April to September were characterized by inaction, confusion, lethargy and inertia … now the Union Government has suddenly woken up and realized that his inertia is going to cost billions of students in his academic year. and therefore, as a knee-jerk reaction … he has hastily and randomly set the dates of the examinations.
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