Bhubaneswar, Dec 23: On Thursday the Odisha CM, Naveen Patnaik stated that the Health Ministry has not taken ‘Odia’ as an option while taking the state government’s views on the language to be adopted for the state’s students which has created widespread resentment among the students of Odisha who will be appearing for the NEET exam in 2017-18, and onwards.
Thus, yesterday Patnaik requested the PM in a letter requesting for his intervention to include Odia language as a medium of examination in the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) for medical courses. He urged the PM to include Odia language for the large interest of students in the state.
In the meantime, the students’ wing of BJD, carried out a rally yesterday in protest of exclusion of Odia as a medium of language for NEET. The protestors demanded inclusion of Odia and in this regard met the Governor and submitted a memorandum addressed to the President of India. On the other hand, the Youth wing of BJP alleged that Odisha gave its consent to the Central government to make English as the medium of language in NEET.
Notably, on Wednesday the Union Health Ministry announced that Odia will not be among the list of eight languages in which the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-UG (NEET-UG) from the 2017-18 academic year would be conducted. The eight languages notified by the Health Ministry are Hindi, English, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, Telugu and Tamil. It’s stated that the candidates who would qualify NEET would become eligible to appear for the All-India quota and other quotas under the state governments/Institutes irrespective of the medium in which the exam was taken by the candidate, subject to other eligibility criteria.
Notably, NEET-UG is the national level medical entrance test conducted by the CBSE Board for getting admissions in MBBS/BDS courses offered by all government and private medical colleges in the country. Being a one tier exam, it’s conducted once in a year, in the month of May. Since 2016, NEET exam has replaced the AIPMT exam. All seats (MBBS/BDS) of any medical/dental college are to be filled by NEET examination score only.
