Tamil Nadu’s Fight Against NEET – Why the State Can’t Simply Walk Away

Earlier this week, amid noisy protests in Delhi over the leaked NEET paper, Tamil Nadu’s chief minister C. Joseph Vijay took to the state Assembly and warned that the national medical‑entrance test is unfair to students from his state. The reaction was swift, the headlines loud, and the question on everyone’s mind – can Tamil Nadu simply opt out of NEET?

Short answer: not right now. The Supreme Court has already held that NEET is the uniform, mandatory gateway for undergraduate medical seats across India. To pull the plug would need a major constitutional shift or, at the very least, the President’s blessing – both of which have been denied in the past.

That said, Vijay’s party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), isn’t throwing in the towel. They’ve floated what they call a “Special Concurrent List” plan – a kind of stop‑gap that could give the state temporary authority over medical admissions while a larger overhaul is worked out.

Why is Tamil Nadu so keen to ditch NEET? The state’s long‑standing policy, before 2017, linked medical college seats to Class 12 board marks. The move to a single, high‑stakes exam has, according to officials, turned the admission process into an urban‑centric, money‑driven race. A Justice A.K. Rajan committee report pointed out that almost 99 % of successful NEET candidates had attended expensive private coaching – a reality that pushes poor, rural aspirants out of the picture. Tamil‑medium students, who once made up about one‑fifth of medical entrants, now barely scrape 2 %.

Beyond the numbers, there’s a deeper fear: doctors who clear NEET often hail from affluent city backgrounds and may be less inclined to serve in Tamil Nadu’s remote health‑centre network. Under the old system, locally trained doctors were more likely to return to their villages, bolstering the state’s praised decentralized health model.

The legal backdrop is a maze. In 1976, the 42nd Amendment shifted “education” from the State List (List II) to the Concurrent List (List III, Entry 25). That means both Parliament and state legislatures can legislate, but Union law trumps when there’s a clash. Add Entry 66 of the Union List (List I), which empowers the Centre to set standards for higher education, and you see why the Supreme Court says a state cannot simply overrule NEET.

TVK’s two‑pronged constitutional strategy attempts to work around these hurdles. First, they propose moving education back to the State List, giving Tamil Nadu – and any other state that follows suit – full control over medical‑admission rules. Second, recognizing the procedural drag of a full amendment, they suggest creating a “Special Concurrent List”. Think of it as a temporary carve‑out that would explicitly let states design their own medical‑admission processes until the permanent shift is legislated.

Both routes would need a constitutional amendment, which in turn demands a majority in Parliament and, ultimately, the President’s assent. Until that happens, NEET stays the sole pathway for medical aspirants in the state, despite the mounting political pressure and recent scandals around paper leaks and NTA mishandlings.

In short, Vijay can’t pull a fast one on NEET today, but the “Special Concurrent List” is his creative, if legally complex, way of keeping the conversation alive and maybe, one day, reshaping how Tamil Nadu picks its future doctors.