The Latest: Top stories of the day
1. India signed a deal to develop Iran's Chabahar port, a move that could reinvigorate ties and open up Afghanistan and Central Asian markets.
2. Three police officers and two terrorists were killed in three separate incidents on a tense day in Srinagar.
3. J Jayalalithaa was sworn in as Tamil Nadu's chief minister for the sixth time, and immediately announced the closure of liquor shops and a free power scheme. Today, Sarbananda Sonowal will be sworn in as Assam's new chief minister.
The Big Story: Not so neat
The President is not yet convinced. On Monday, Pranab Mukherjee asked for further clarifications from the government regarding its ordinance, cleared by the Cabinet last week, which would defer for a year the implementation of a National Entrance-cum-Eligibility Test for medical undergraduate students. The move came after the Supreme Court mandated the holding of a common medical entrance exam this year, only to be met by a flurry of complaints from students especially in states where the local medical entrance exams had been conducted or were quite different.
Two impulses are at play here. The Supreme Court's order was based on the impulse that a common exam would level the playing field for medical aspirants across the country, while cutting down on the rigging that has been known to happen in some state examinations. The intention was to create one meritorious all-India list that colleges could then use for admissions, in the same way that many other joint entrance examinations work.
But enforcing NEET means creating a uniform approach to medical examinations and forcing students from across the country to use that model. This means students who don't study in English or Hindi and aren't from Central Board for Secondary Education schools are likely to be at a disadvantage. It also undermines cooperative federalism on the educational front, by favouring central systems built out of Delhi.
Indeed, the irony is that an entrance exam that is meant to level the playing field will create new inequalities, benefiting students in central boards and those who have studied in certain languages. The government's ordinance, putting the decision off by a year, is a chance to examine these issues and with the Supreme Court looking over its should come to a final decision t
The Big Scroll
NEET FAQ: What the apex court order means for admission to medical and dental undergraduate courses.
Why the side effects of NEET are much more damaging than the disease it claims to cure.
India's healthcare system will suffer because of NEET's bias towards the CBSE syllabus.
"Confusion must end": Centre's ordinance on NEET elicits mixed responses from medical aspirants.
Politicking & Policying
1. Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to celebrate his government's second anniversary witha marathon five-hour television show starring him, actor Amitabh Bachchan and the rest of the Cabinet.
2. Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief M Karunanidhi complained that his son and party treasurer MK Stalin was given only a 16th row seat at Jayalalithaa's swearing-in ceremony.
3. The Supreme Court will hear a plea by one of the two Italian marines accused of murdering Kerala fishermen to return to Italy in the aftermath of a UN court's recommending that he be permitted to go.
Punditry
1. Rajeev Dhavan in the Indian Express says it is time for the instrument of President's Rule to be abolished.
2. How in just four weeks political parties routed Rs 1,000 crore of illicit wealth through criminal networks to bribe voters, and why you didn't hear about it, writes Sreenivasan Jain in the Business Standard.
3. V Anantha Nageswaran in Mint says Subramaniam Swamy is causing irreparable damage to the Prime Minister, to the economy, to the post of Reserve Bank of India Governor and has put the government in a lose-lose situation.
Don't Miss
Overrated Outcast "spoke" to India's favourite right-wing luminaries to evaluate the first two years of Modi Sarkar.
"Now, there are many things that America invented before we got around to making them ourselves – nuclear weapons, unmanned drones, large media corporations that openly shill for their owners’ business interests. However, the Muslim hating, immigrant bashing, homophobic, sexist, politician-draped-in-orange shtick was invented in India. That’s right, Donald. Our next contributor, Subramanian Swamy, was advocating fascism a long time before anyone had even heard of you and your tiny hands."
