Tamil Nadu government is pushing the centre as much as it can. On Wednesday, when union finance minister Arun Jaitley proposed a national testing agency to hold entrance exams for professional courses, Tamil Nadu government got the assembly to pass its bills seeking to exempt its students from the compulsory National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for admission to medical and dental colleges.

In all some dozen bills, including the Tamil Nadu Admission to MBBS and BDS Courses Bill 2017 that does away with NEET, introduced on Tuesday by health minister C Vijaya Baskar, were passed with support from all the political parties. In fact, the fate of the bills were never in doubt as the entire political class in Tamil Nadu, as also sections of the academia and students, were against the common entrance test from the moment it was conceived.

The move was vehemently opposed by late chief minister J Jayalalithaa, and her party and AIADMK government headed by O Panneerselvam are staunchly following the direction she gave. Jayalalithaa had opposed the NEET and had got exemption last year too for students from Tamil Nadu and had wanted a permanent solution to the issue.

The main grounds for opposing the NEET and similar exams, are that the common entrance test puts the students from villages and from Tamil medium schools at a disadvantage against the city dwellers and English medium educated students from outside Tamil Nadu too.

DMK working president MK Stalin himself had been demanding the introduction of bills to do way with NEET and so it was no surprise that almost everyone present in the house gave their stamp of approval for the bills, including the one that stipulates that only qualifying examination marks be taken into consideration for admission to PG medical courses in Tamil Nadu.

This passage of bills in TN assembly goes against the grain of the argument as also the thought process of the central government that wants a standardized and uniform admission tests for professional courses like medicine, engineering and other professional courses. Which is why, Jaitely in his budget speech in Lok Sabha mentioned the proposal to set up a National Testing Service (NTS). This would also conduct exams for entrance to IITs, IIMs and the AICTE that at present conduct admission texts to different courses in the country.

It is not just Tamil Nadu alone, but states like Maharashtra and Karnataka are also opposing the intrusion into the higher education sector, which is in the concurrent list. Tamil Nadu, like many other states, is opposing NEET also on the grounds that the central government move was an intrusion into its domain.

While the move to exempt students from Tamil Nadu from NEET is seen as a populist move, experts do make a case for making students from the state tough and able to take on any challenges. When it comes to foreign universities, there is no problem everyone is taking their tests. So, instead of placing the students in a cocoon of comfort zone, they must be given higher, better and quality education from the smaller classes so that they can compete with the best, said an academician who preferred anonymity.

“For speaking this, I might be targeted,” the academician lamented.