Kalam clears Bill, Karunanidhi govt one step closer to its ‘level playing field’

With the Tamil Nadu Admission in Professional Educational Institutions Bill receiving a nod from the President...

With the Tamil Nadu Admission in Professional Educational Institutions Bill receiving a nod from the President, the state government has won a crucial round in its battle “to provide a level playing ground”, particularly to poor students unable to afford coaching for entrance examinations to professional courses.

The presidential assent comes in the wake of court rulings that state assemblies do not have the legislative competence to abolish entrance tests as long as Central legislations make them mandatory. But in December last year, the DMK government passed the Bill to abolish the CET (Common Entrance Test) beginning next academic year for professional courses in Engineering, Medicine, Dental and Agricultural Sciences, based on the Anandakrishnan Committee’s recommendation.

The legislation would do away with CET for students of all boards, including the state board and the CBSE, for both aided and unaided educational institutions. Admissions to professional courses would now be based on marks obtained by a student in the relevant subjects in the qualifying plus-two examination.

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In a bid to get around the legal hurdle, the Bill, however, incorporated an equalisation formula on a pattern similar to that of the

Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani. The Anandakrishnan Committee suggested that the

Bill “explicitly propose the normalisation process for ensuring equal opportunity for admission to students from different boards”.

The normalisation formula prescribed that the highest mark obtained by students of various boards in each subject be equated to the highest mark obtained by students of the state board in that subject, and the relative marks obtained by other students of other boards in that subject would be determined accordingly.

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In other words, if a student of the Tamil Nadu State Board in the plus-two examination secures the highest mark of 100 in a subject, and if the highest mark secured by a student of any other board in the same subject is 90, both these marks would be considered equivalent to 100. And, if another student of any other board, say CBSE, secures 60 marks in Mathematics, when the first mark of the same board (CBSE) is 90, then 60 marks of that student will be equivalent to 66.66, as per the formula.

On an average, around 5,000 CBSE students take the CET in Tamil Nadu. Last year, 5.22 lakh students had appeared for the state board plus-two examination.

Justifying the Bill, state Minister for Higher Education K Ponmudi pointed out that it was “unfair” to expect more than five lakh students of the state board to take the CET for the sake of 5,000-odd students from the other boards.

The ‘populist’ move to scrap CET began under the previous Jayalalithaa regime, which passed a government order in 2005. But following petitions challenging the order, the Madras High Court struck it down. The Supreme Court too refused to stay the High Court order.

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Subsequently, a law enacted by the AIADMK government abolishing entrance examinations for the state board higher secondary students alone was held “unconstitutional” by the court, which also ruled that the state Assembly had no legislative competence to enact such a law. The Court also pointed out that regulations of the Medical Council of India, All India Council for Technical Education and other national bodies stipulated that entrance tests were mandatory when students belonging to different streams like the state board, CBSE and ICSE were competing for admission.

Hence, any legislation to do away with the entrance examination would be “repugnant to Central regulations and therefore illegal”. The law also “discriminated” between state and central board students, and violated the norm of equality before law, the court had observed then. The SC too declined to stay the operation of the High Court order and the Jayalalithaa government gave up its move to abolish CET. For the ruling DMK the legal battle is not over yet.