Honestly, I didn't mean to write this piece on NEET. But I wanted to write it in my perspective, NEET, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test. Over the last few weeks there has been a lot of debate and discussion, a lot of different points of view: ban NEET, pro-NEET, and now people have even started questioning whether we should abolish the reservation system too. Some of these arguments are fact-based, some are emotional, and some are ego- and entitlement-oriented. And one set of conversations triggered me to write this, so that I can share it, and people can think a little better.

Let me be very clear about a few things first. This is all my experience, my thought, how I see it, along with the facts as I know them, and how I think everyone should look at it. And this is specifically about Tamil Nadu. I'm writing it from my own journey, as someone who couldn't get the medical cutoff, who chose engineering then, and who is a student even now. And as a data scientist, I also want to bring in how to look at the numbers. I'm recording this, so I don't have exact numbers in front of me, but I do want to point out the fallacies people carry when they compare the pre-NEET and post-NEET scenarios in Tamil Nadu.

The claim I want to address

There's one segment of the argument that goes like this: before NEET, not enough government-school students got into medical schools, and after NEET they were able to, especially after the 7.5% reservation that the Tamil Nadu government gave (brought in when Edappadi Palaniswami was Chief Minister, from the AIADMK, one of the renowned Dravidian parties).

So the first thing to understand is: what was the scenario before NEET?

Tamil Nadu before NEET

Before NEET, Tamil Nadu's medical admissions, across government and private medical colleges, for MBBS and BDS seats, were truly based on cutoffs. The cutoff was calculated out of 200: physics, chemistry, and biology, where each subject is scored out of 200 and then converted, biology to 100, physics to 50, chemistry to 50.

At that time, around 2013 to 2015, government college fees were very low, maybe ₹10,000 to ₹20,000 a year, while private colleges were around ₹2–3 lakhs, sometimes ₹5 lakhs depending on the college. (For comparison, when I recently checked private medical colleges in a state like Uttar Pradesh, it's somewhere around ₹15–20 lakhs a year, with the overall package coming close to a crore.) So naturally, students from humble backgrounds always wanted to get into government colleges, the fees were far less and the exposure was very good.

And successive Tamil Nadu governments were focused on building this. During the DMK period (2006–2011) under M. Karunanidhi, and under J. Jayalalithaa (2011 onward), and even after Edappadi Palaniswami became Chief Minister, all three governments focused on developing medical infrastructure, starting medical colleges, especially the policy started in the DMK rule of establishing medical colleges in every district headquarters. I recall that around 2011–2013, when Jayalalithaa was CM, new medical colleges were announced in Theni, Namakkal, Karur, and other places. The state was completely focused on this, and everything was managed through the Tamil Nadu Dr. MGR Medical University, which controlled medical admissions and medical education in the state.

To get into the top government colleges, the famous, decades- and century-old ones like Madras Medical College, Kilpauk, Stanley, and the ones in Madurai, Coimbatore, and Salem (Mohan Kumaramangalam), the cutoff used to be around 195 to 200, depending on the category (open, backward, most backward, scheduled). And the differences were minute: 195 versus 195.5, 198.5 versus 198. There was huge competition, and the seats were only a few thousand. The supply was less, but the government always pushed to increase it, college by college, even if each new college was only 50, 60, or 120 seats (because the Medical Council of India and the Union government approve seats based on various constraints).

My story, a government-school kid

Let me put my own story here. From my first standard to my tenth, I studied in government schools. Till fifth, it was the Panchayat Union Elementary School; from sixth to tenth, it was the Government Higher Secondary School, Singalandapuram, a village near Rasipuram, in West Tamil Nadu. And this story could overlap with many students from a similar background, because that's how the journey of many government-school students went.

I performed very well, I was rank one from my first standard till tenth. I got school first in my tenth with 491, which was third among the government schools of the district. And the district I come from, Namakkal, is very famous for producing state ranks. Students from other districts come and join the private schools in Namakkal for their eleventh and twelfth, because the environment, the strategy, and the way of coaching there gave people a real shot at cracking the cutoff and getting a medical or engineering seat.

Why "fewer government-school students" is misleading

Here's the crucial part. Many of these renowned private schools, across Rasipuram, Namakkal, and nearby districts like Karur, Erode, and Salem, were not started by business owners or people running schools like enterprises. They were started by government-school teachers, back in the early 2000s, who used to run private tuition. In the 1980s and 1990s, there were entrance examinations for everything, so these teachers grouped together and ran focused private tuition after school hours, 5 to 7, or 5 to 8. Over time, those tuitions became schools. That's how many of the well-known private schools in the region were started. So they knew how to train a student to crack the cutoff.

And back then, the exam was common. Before NEET, every school, private or government, followed the same syllabus and the same cutoff method. Based on that, the state government managed the seats (there was an all-India quota of around a thousand; the remaining ~2,500–3,000 were managed by the state's medical counseling).

Now, here's the thing these schools did. If a government-school student got a good mark, 470, 480, 490, they were given free seats. It wasn't a formal mechanism; it was more that these private schools had a philanthropic tendency, and government-school students (or at least the ones with awareness about it) knew to take it up. In my region, and in villages with good connectivity like mine, that awareness had been there, cohort after cohort. So if you got a good mark, you could get free admission, either free hostel plus tuition, or free tuition. For me, I did my eleventh and twelfth at SRV Boys Higher Secondary School, Rasipuram, one of the well-known ones, and for two years, I didn't pay a single rupee. (I wasn't given hostel, because I lived just five or six kilometers away; students from farther districts, Perambalur, Ariyalur, Villupuram, got the hostel.)

And there it is: that is the real reason the number of government-school students appeared "less" in medical admissions before NEET. The government-school students who had the potential and got the better marks were approached, taken in, and coached by these private schools, and then counted as private-school students. It was two things at once: they were chosen, and they chose it, because these schools could invest in them and it was a very good name for the schools too.

The holistic ecosystem

I want people, inside and outside Tamil Nadu, to acknowledge how holistic this education ecosystem actually was, because there was so much support around it. There were philanthropists and industrialists supporting families and paying fees. There were media houses, Tamil newspapers organized career-guidance meetups. There were charitable trusts. And the teachers in these schools would themselves go looking: "this kid in a remote village is performing very well, he needs some attention, let's admit him." I know one of my batchmates who was exactly like that, brought in from a remote village by one of the math teachers, given admission with hostel.

I'll tell you a small thing, because it captures the environment. The cooks and helpers in these school hostels, after serving the students their dinner (which finished by 8, before the students went for their study hours), would take the leftover food and sell it in the nearby villages as informal night food centres. And this wasn't scraps; the schools cooked a lot, and after the students ate, maybe 30 meals were left. Whenever my family didn't cook at night, we'd go and buy it, five rupees for parotta and gravy, or a very good variety meal. There was even competition for it, because it would run out quickly. That's the kind of everyday ecosystem it was.

And the scholarships helped a lot. My mother and I once travelled to receive a ₹5,000 scholarship in 2013–2014. That was a big amount for us, my father was earning around ₹5,000–6,000 a month then. That kind of money could support a lot: reading materials, photocopies of question papers, travel to career meetups. It could even absorb a sudden illness, I was facing anemia and allergy back then, and used to get a weekly vitamin B12 injection. Such support genuinely helped.

The important point is that all of this, private schools, government schools, philanthropists, media, charitable trusts, families, was an ecosystem that helped and benefited each other. There was no discrimination inside the schools either: fee-paying students and concession students sat in the same classrooms, got the same treatment, followed the same pattern. Everyone was equal.

How we actually learned

And the learning itself was holistic, and, honestly, joyful. It was not mugging up. Because there was only one exam and one cutoff, and the entire syllabus was understood, not memorized. If a question asked you to write about the functions of the heart, you learned to draw the heart, label it, explain the equations, structure your points. It wasn't just about clearing the cutoff, it was about getting the full mark, out of 1,200.

And people put love into it. In Tamil and English, people showed curiosity and creativity, poems, supplementaries, essays. My own Tamil papers used to be full of drawings, I'd draw the index, draw mind maps, draw pictures to tell an essay. In physics, chemistry, and biology I chose the pictorial questions on purpose, I got so happy and excited explaining them: drawing a cyclotron, drawing communication diagrams, explaining plant biology or zoology, reading every page of every chapter.

It's been more than a decade since I finished school, and that influence is still with me. I never prepared for any entrance exam; I never went to a CBSE or ICSE school, the kind of place where people flaunt, "oh, you're from state board, you all just mug up." You know what? I have very good storytelling, I write well, I can think visually, and whatever I'm doing now has a strong influence from those twelve years of state-board schooling.

Compare that with NEET coaching. If you watch some of those coaching videos, you'll find them ridiculous, it's mugging up cheat sheets, pure pattern matching to memorize a set of answer keys. It's like people who grind LeetCode just for a metric, always referring to a cheat sheet, "let me look for this pattern and do that." Pattern recognition is fine, but only pattern recognition, drilling permutations of questions, is silly, and far worse than a class teacher who simply comes in and explains the concept, draws it, questions you. We were front-bench students; you sit up front, the teacher makes you stand and read the passages and poems, the Tamil and English teachers sing the poems, the botany and zoology teachers bring in the specimens and the lab. It was a holistic education. I'm not saying it didn't exist anywhere else, and there's always room for improvement, but whatever was there was genuinely good, and I enjoyed it. It gave me memories, and the freedom to learn. There was just one objective: get a good score, get a medical seat, because my family wanted me to become a doctor, since there were no doctors in our family. That was the mindset at the time. (Now I have a lot of dreams and different points of view, but that was the situation.)

My own outcome

I couldn't get into medical, for a few reasons. I fell sick. And I didn't focus enough, that was around my sixteens and seventeens, and I was playing around, I lacked focus. I got a cutoff of around 180–185, but you needed better, because there were people with all the facilities and focus. So I chose engineering.

After NEET, what changed

After NEET was introduced, the situation changed all over Tamil Nadu. Everyone in this ecosystem faced stress and psychological strain, and, more than that, a kind of snatching of our rights, a question mark over cooperative federalism and state autonomy. It was, more or less, stealing the infrastructure and the policies that the Tamil Nadu government and these Dravidian parties had invested in and designed over decades. Because, and you can do your own homework here, this system, this ecosystem, doesn't exist in many other states of India. Compare Tamil Nadu's government and private schooling against other states, and you'll find Tamil Nadu's educational ecosystem is far, far ahead, psychologically, operationally, economically, however you want to measure it.

Now, private schools have to tie up with coaching institutes from other places, a very corporate, very machine way of doing it. And on top of that, almost everyone, not just low-income or government-school students, but middle-class families too, has to pay extra fees for coaching. There are now two exam patterns, two different syllabi (state board versus NCERT). You're competing against outsiders for your own state's medical seats. It opened up repetition, people can take two years just to prepare, spending ₹3–5 lakhs, going to boarding in Kerala or elsewhere. It burdened the students, the parents, and the autonomous nature of both private and government schools. And it ruined the cohesion, the philanthropy in the ecosystem. Earlier, private schools funded and helped low-income and government-school students. Now it's become: whoever can pay, does. You can repeat multiple times, you pay for it, and it becomes a game of finding jugaad, which I don't call learning. And I don't agree that NEET brings any "quality."

On "quality"

There's an argument that medicine is a life-saving field, so how can everyone just go and learn it? You know what, it's a six-year course, 5.5 years plus residency, with a very stringent and established way of teaching, tests, curriculum, and practical work. The quality is established there. If you look at the quality of Tamil Nadu's doctors and government hospitals, the mortality rates, the specialty surgeries, the critical, once-in-a-decade operations that have happened in government medical colleges across Tamil Nadu, you can easily say that Tamil Nadu's medical education, before NEET, was already great. I'm not saying it reduced after NEET. I'm saying Tamil Nadu's medical ecosystem has always been great, and it was built and run by people from exactly these backgrounds. It's not that you have to be from AIIMS to be a good doctor. Read the newspaper articles, check the media releases, see how many life-saving operations have happened in government medical colleges across Tamil Nadu. There's no doubt about how we were taught, or about the quality of the education. And everyone had their own autonomy, we weren't herded towards random outsiders selling us video kits and devices and repeater batches, with lakhs and lakhs of fees all going out of the state.

Tamil Nadu's response

And Tamil Nadu has not played the victim card over the last decade, after the NEET admissions began around 2016–2017. Number one, the Tamil Nadu government under Edappadi Palaniswami provided 7.5% reservation for government-school students, which is actually a balancing move. They added new government medical colleges (around eleven). Government model schools with NEET-specific training were started, so that everyone gets access to that training. (People now say "we have to bring in the training", everyone is doing it, but they have to understand the fundamentals of it.) And later, during 2021–2025 under M.K. Stalin, the same 7.5% reservation was extended to government-school students for engineering education as well, and that created another positive impact, because a lot of rural government-school students got very good access to private colleges in the cities and towns. Even students with a lower cutoff, say around 175 in engineering, who earlier wouldn't have got a good college, can now get one with better exposure, and the government pays their fees (around ₹1–1.5 lakhs a year).

So nobody from outside this ecosystem can turn around and say "you lack quality, you're just discriminating with reservation." They don't have the ground, the facts, or the moral standing to stand against what the people and the government of Tamil Nadu have been voicing for a decade, which is to ban NEET, to protect our educational ecosystem, our medical infrastructure, our years of policy-shaping, and the social cohesion and harmony in the state.

A few questions, if this angered you

There could be one or two factual mistakes in here, if you find them, apologies, and please write back to me. I genuinely welcome comments and different points of view, because the whole idea is to support and improve the education system, especially to nurture Tamil Nadu's.

And if this triggered you, if you're sitting there thinking "what is this guy blabbering about", maybe check a few questions for yourself. Number one: have you found such an ecosystem, such stories, in other states? Number two: have you looked at the malpractices and drawbacks of the highly-priced, highly-monopolized coaching industry? Number three: does your state, or any other state, have a more cohesive medical and education infrastructure? Check the numbers after you've done that, and you'll see that NEET has no real role in giving rural and government-school students access to medical education. That's a myth. That access always came from the generosity and the policies of the state government, not from whatever people imagine "the Indian education system" to be, thinking only of CBSE and high-fi, sophisticated environments.

Why I'm writing this at all

One more personal thing. I was talking to my mother recently, next year, I'm planning to set up a ₹5-lakh fund to support rural students in getting access to AI, technology, and other things. Because I come from there. This holistic ecosystem of Tamil Nadu, family, fellow students, private and public institutions, philanthropists, people who simply had the tendency to help, is what supported me and my family and uplifted us. Whatever level I'm at now, it's because of it.

I may not have the IIT stories, or the Delhi Public School, R.K. Puram stories, or the "I went to this coaching centre" stories. I don't regret that, and I don't miss it. I had a very good experience, Tamil Nadu's ecosystem was like that. Before NEET, things were genuinely good. And after NEET, Tamil Nadu's resilience has never gone down, but it has had to work on that resilience, improvising the policies, navigating the chaos created by the injustice of NEET.

So that's why I say ban NEET. It's not that we lack capability. It's not that we lack infrastructure. It's not that we have bad education. It's none of that at all. It's a question of cooperative federalism, and of protecting something a whole state built, together, over decades.