‘My bat, my rules’ shouldn’t govern NEET. It eliminates poor students even before the match begins

In gully cricket, the batting order is often randomly decided by holding up numbers behind a person’s back. Let chance rectify the problems with NEET too.

Representational image | Students protest NEET results | ANI

My bat, my rules. This mantra has echoed through the streets of gully cricket, giving the one with the bat an unfair advantage. It’s not about skill, but just the privilege of having parents who could buy a bat. Unjust, right? Yet, this scenario mirrors the inequities in India’s current college admissions system.

The mismanagement of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) triggered widespread protests across the country. Arbitrary grace marks and proliferating paper leakages made students feel their ranks no longer reflected their ‘merit’. But the uproar is an opportunity for students to realise that the admissions system never truly reflected the ‘merit’ they defined as their ‘own effort’. The merit it upholds has everything to do with vastly different starting points of financial, social and cultural capital allocated by, in the words of political economist Praveen Chakravarty, ‘birth lottery’. The so-called ‘merit’ isn’t exactly a product of ‘hard work’, but merely an illusion that hides the system’s primary servitude of the privileged.

As Chakravarty wrote in The Deccan Herald, 75 per cent of India’s senior professional jobs are dominated by the ‘upper caste’ who make up just 20 per cent of the country’s population. They have worked hard but also held the ‘bat’ of upper-caste privilege. Reservation attempts to fix this but creates another problem. Seventy-five per cent of sub-castes within the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) have secured only three per cent of the educational seats reserved for them, including medical admissions. The Justice Rohini Commission found in 2018 that more than 97 per cent of reserved jobs and seats went to a dominant 25 per cent of OBC sub-castes. Are these three-quarters without merit or using a plastic bat against a leather ball?

Decoding the ‘merit’ argument

In NEET’s game, the umpire declares poor students ‘out’ even before they have faced the first ball. Economically disadvantaged students lack access to expensive coaching. According to a report by The Indian Express, students from families with an annual income of less than Rs 2.5 lakh secured 41 per cent of admissions in the pre-NEET period—a figure that fell to 36 per cent in the post-NEET years. Similarly, in the American SAT, students from families earning over $200,000 annually are ten times more likely to score well enough for top colleges than those from families earning less than $20,000. Despite reservation-like affirmative action policies to adjust for ‘true merit’, working-class students are as unlikely to attend prestigious institutions today as they were 70 years ago.

Students from low-income families, more likely to study in regional languages at non-CBSE, state board schools, face more hurdles in this ‘merit’ race. In NEET 2021, students from CBSE boards comprised 33.5 per cent of qualified candidates but over 50 per cent of the top 10,000.

According to the Justice AK Rajan Committee, fewer students from rural and low-income backgrounds, and Tamil medium and Tamil state board schools secured admission in Tamil Nadu’s medical colleges after the introduction of NEET in 2017-18.

In the four years from 2017-18, the share of Tamil-medium students in medical colleges reportedly ranged between 1.6 per cent and 3.27 per cent, compared to 14.88 per cent in 2016-17. The share of English-medium students, on the other hand, increased to 98.41 per cent in 2017-18 from 85.12 per cent in 2016-17. The results were likely similar for regional language students across states.

Let chance rectify the problem

Many of our celebrated T20 World Cup winners, such as Surya Kumar Yadav and Jasprit Bumrah, started with gully cricket. One can’t imagine that such fierce competitors would have let the boy with the bat dictate the game. Instead, they fought for just treatment. In gully cricket, the batting order is often randomly decided by holding up numbers behind a person’s back as they unknowingly call out names.

Likewise, the solution to the NEET exam’s inequities is the same—let chance rectify the problem it wrought at birth. Let us set a standard that assures us of knowledge and capability, and put all candidates qualifying above that in a social lottery. Then, we can randomly select the required number of candidates. This will radically lower the barriers to entry and the impact of expensive coaching in determining outcomes.

The objection that this approach won’t give us the most qualified doctors is unfounded. The Netherlands’ adoption of a social lottery for its doctors has propelled the country to a top-three ranking in European healthcare, boasting the lowest mortality rates among treatable causes. Medical admissions in Ireland and Sweden, and experimental programmes in Australia and Canada, have also embraced this method as a proven solution. To test it in India, we could ask new medical colleges to admit half of their class based on the lottery, while maintaining the traditional rank-based process for the other half. They could later compare the results through students’ exit exams.

Second, concerns about protections for oppressed groups are addressed by the randomness of the lottery, which would roughly reflect the proportion of different groups in the population, making it fairer than the current skew toward the rich in any social group. This is why Stephen Machin, economics professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has argued that this admissions lottery of the qualified could be a solution for true social mobility.

To solve a second problem, we can prioritise students willing to commit their skills to underserved rural areas. According to government data, the two-thirds of Indians who live in villages face worse healthcare conditions than before, with nearly 80 per cent of medical specialist positions in villages empty as of 2022.

In addition to fairer admissions and rural healthcare, we get more benefits too. Requiring a standard of knowledge and not a rank would reduce the burden of preparation on students, making their lives happier and healthier. This can address the financial and social stresses of the coaching industry that have destroyed families: the number of student suicides has risen each year, climbing over 13,000 in 2021. Exam pressures were identified as a critical causal factor.

When those at the top can no longer manipulate the system, they will push for better educational quality in a greater number of colleges to ensure that their children receive a good education, benefiting everyone. We may not have to build 500 AIIMS, but this civic participation by the elite can ensure that at least 500 colleges have the quality of AIIMS. The one with the bat shouldn’t dictate the game, just as birth and privilege shouldn’t determine a student’s future. India’s most popular sport inspires a social lottery approach to give all an equitable shot at success.

Tanush Sawhney is a sophomore student at Columbia University. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)