The NEET Illusion: Why India Must Return to State-Level Medical Admissions Since its inception, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) has been aggressively promoted as the ultimate equalizer for medical education in India. The promise was simple: one nation, one examination, one standard. However, beneath this rhetoric of “uniformity” lies a far more disruptive reality. NEET has gradually evolved into a centralized mandate that weakens state autonomy, disrupts admission systems annually, and effectively redistributes medical resources from states that invested heavily in healthcare infrastructure to those that did not.
The most common defense of NEET is “standardization.” But this argument itself is fundamentally flawed. A uniform entrance examination does not automatically produce better doctors. Evaluating students before they enter a five-and-a-half-year medical…