JEE Main, NEET 2020: Rahul Gandhi says Centre must listen to students’ ‘mann ki baat’ over entrance

The Supreme Court order has led an online campaign for postponing the engineering and medical exams – JEE Main and NEET – during the COVID-19 pandemic. On Twitter, several politicians have joined the debate under the trending hashtags #SATYAGRAH_AgainstExamsInCovid and #StudentsKeMannKiBaat.

The National Testing Agency (NTA), however, has already released the admit cards for JEE Main scheduled to begin from September 1. As per the official data, a total of 8,58,273 students have registered to appear for JEE Main while nearly 16 lakh had registered to appear for NEET. Concerns have been raised over holding exams for such a large number of students amid the pandemic.

West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee on Monday appealed to centre to postpone the engineering, medical entrance exams- JEE Main, NEET scheduled to be held in September. In her tweet, CM wrote, “Now with the directive of
@EduMinOfIndia to conduct NEET, JEE 2020 in Sep, I would again appeal to the Centre to assess the risk and postpone these examinations until the situation is conducive again. It is our duty to ensure a safe environment for all our students.”

Recently, the Delhi Education Minister Manish Sisodia also took to Twitter to voice his opinion on the issue. Asking the government to look at alternative modes of admissions, Sisodia wrote on Twitter that the approach of considering NEET and JEE as the only modes of admission is very narrow and impractical. As the educational institutes across the world are adopting newer ways for admission, why can we not consider them in India? he said.

Several others have also raised their concerns regarding these exams.

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The NTA, in an official statement, said that it has made “elaborate arrangements to sanitise the centres before and after the conduct of the exam, give fresh masks and hand gloves” to students. It has also issued an advisory regarding COVID-19 for all functionaries for centre managements which the NTA claims is based on MHRD’s guidelines. NTA also claims to have written to state chief secretaries, DGPs and other authorities to manage crowd inside and outside exam centre, ensure power supply and other facilities.

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