NEET-UG 2024 result row: Congress communication in-charge Jairam Ramesh lashed out at the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and called it a political tool for the ruling party. His comments came after the National Testing Agency blamed NCERT for the “grace marks” fiasco in the NEET 2024 examinations.
Ramesh, one of the many voices criticising NTA and NCERT, also said that the blame game is only the NTA’s attempt to draw the attention away from its own “abject failures”.
“However it is true that the NCERT is no longer a professional institution. It has been functioning as an RSS affiliate since 2014. It has just been revealed that its revised Class XI political science textbook criticises the idea of secularism as well as what it considers policies of political parties in this regard. NCERT's objective is to produce textbooks, not political pamphlets and propaganda. NCERT is mounting an assault on our country's Constitution in whose Preamble secularism features explicitly as a foundational pillar of the Indian republic. Various Supreme Court judgments have clearly held secularism to be an essential part of the basic structure of the Constitution,” he said.
Ramesh in his disparaging comments said that NCERT would do well to remind itself that it is the National Council for Educational Research and not “Nagpur or Narendra Council for Educational Research and Training”, an apparent jibe at RSS that has its headquarters in Nagpur, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“All of its textbooks are now of dubious quality vastly different from those that shaped me in school,” he said.
The Congress leader’s statement comes after NTA said that the changes made in NCERT textbooks and grace marks that were given to students for loss of time are some of the reasons behind students getting high marks.
Meanwhile, Ramesh’s remarks were a dig at NCERT director Dinesh Prasad Saklani, who said that references to Gujarat riots and Babri masjid demolition were modified in school textbooks because teaching about riots can “create violent and depressed citizens." "Why should we teach about riots in school textbooks? We want to create positive citizens not violent and depressed individuals,” said Saklani in an interview to news agency PTI.
"Should we teach our students in a manner that they become offensive, create hatred in society or become victim of hatred? Is that education's purpose? Should we teach about riots to such young children ... when they grow up, they can learn about it but why school textbooks. Let them understand what happened and why it happened when they grow up. The hue and cry about the changes is irrelevant," he said.
NEET-UG 2024 CONTROVERSY
NTA has been accused of inflating marks as well as of other irregularities in the medical entrance exam that was conducted on May 5 at 4,750 centres in 571 cities.
A plea filed by 20 students has been filed in the Supreme Court that sought scrapping of the NEET-UG 2024 exam and the formation of a court-monitored probe by CBI into the alleged irregularities. The petition also sought a direction to NTA to conduct the test afresh.
It highlighted that NTA disclosed that 67 candidates scored maximum possible marks of 720 out of 720.
Many candidates also filed writ petitions before the High Courts of Punjab & Haryana, Delhi and Chattisgarh that they were not given enough time to complete the exam as it started late in certain centres. NTA’s Grievance Redressal Committee that found merit in the concerns suggested that they be compensated for the loss of time, based on a formula that was approved by the Supreme Court in the CLAT examination in 2018. Upon the calculation and award of grace marks to 1,563 candidates, six ended up scoring a perfect 720.
After the furore, NTA said that they have canceled the grace marks that were given to the 1,573 candidates. They will now have to either take a retest or forgo the compensatory marks.
There also have been complaints of paper leaks in certain states. The Economic Offences Unit (EOU) of Bihar Police has, meanwhile, recovered post-dated cheques, suspected to be issued in the favour of the mafia demanding Rs 30 lakh from each candidate allegedly seeking leaked question papers of NEET.