The Movement Beyond the Leak: Why Shanmugam Anitha's Dream Still Defines the Fight Against NEET.
By Alan John Koshy
The recent protests that swept through Delhi, where thousands gathered and were met with brutal police crackdowns, may appear to the casual observer as an outburst towards the NEET paper leak scandals.
While the immediate demands for the resignation of the Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and compensation for affected families are critical, to limit this movement to a single examination irregularity is to ignore its much deeper and more painful origins.
The very spine of this movement was first shaped nearly a decade ago by the 17-year-old daughter of a daily wage labourer in Tamil Nadu whose dream of becoming a doctor was thwarted by the very existence of NEET.
A Child Who Deserved Better
Shanmugham Anitha was a 17-year-old girl from Kulumur village in Ariyalur district, a pocket of rural Tamil Nadu renowned for being the state’s cement hub. Her father worked as a daily wage labourer. Her mother had passed away when she was young, leaving Anitha and her four elder brothers to be raised by her grandmother in a home that did not even have a toilet.
She studied in a Tamil-medium government school, where she rose to become the only student in her entire district to score 100% in both Physics and Mathematics in her 12th standard examinations. Out of 1200 marks, she scored 1176. By any honest measure, Anitha was exceptional.
She wanted to become a doctor. Her own mother had died without timely medical help, and Anitha was determined that no one in her village would suffer the same fate.
But Anitha understood something that the architects of NEET refused to acknowledge. She knew that poor rural students could not afford the expensive coaching required to crack an exam that demanded 180 questions be answered in just 180 minutes. She strongly believed that if admissions were based on 12th standard marks alone, rural students like her would finally have a fair shot.
With this conviction, she approached the Supreme Court with a petition against NEET. She watched as Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) students, represented by senior advocate Nalini Chidambaram, argued that admissions should be made only on the basis of NEET. The Court agreed.
After the verdict, Nalini Chidambaram, who is married to former Union Minister P. Chidambaram, offered a chilling observation: "Any further appeal against NEET can only be done to God." That was a clear message to every rural, Dalit, OBC and Adivasi student in the country: Your fight is over, the doors are closed.
Nine days after the verdict, Anitha waited for a moment of solitude when her father and grandmother were out of the house. In that moment, she went to the innermost room of their small cement home that had held all her dreams and ended her young life.
The system had told her, in the clearest possible terms, that her 1176 marks meant nothing. That her brilliance in Physics and Mathematics was irrelevant. That her dream of serving her community was not valid unless she could afford coaching that her father's daily wages could never cover. She had been squeezed between the cracks of a broken system.
A Systematic Squeeze: The Data Behind the Exclusion
The Justice A.K. Rajan Committee was constituted by the Tamil Nadu government to quantify what Anitha's tragedy represented: the institutional exclusion of the poor and rural.
Justice Rajan, a retired Madras High Court judge who was born in a rural village himself, had once been forced to give up his dreams of becoming an engineer because of a change in exam rules in the 1970s. Perhaps that is why he understood, in a way that others could not, how a single examination could destroy a lifetime of aspiration.
The report, backed by over 85,000 public submissions, presents a damning case against NEET. Rural Tamil Nadu students, who once constituted a majority in medical admissions at 61.5% pre-NEET, saw their share drop to 49.9% post-NEET. The committee found that the exam has effectively wiped Tamil-medium students off the map. They went from representing up to 20% of admissions to a mere 1.6-3.2%. First-generation graduates, those with no doctor in the family, plummeted from nearly a quarter of admissions to just 14.5%.
Justice Rajan himself did not mince his words when he said: "NEET drives away the poor; only the rich and the affluent garner most seats". Anitha understood this before any committee was formed.
A System Working Exactly as Intended
NEET is administered in roughly 550 cities and towns across India, yet only a handful of these locations have the kind of coaching ecosystems that have become virtually mandatory for success. For students outside these areas, the exam is effectively inaccessible. This is not a Tamil Nadu problem. It is a national crisis.
With 63% of India’s population residing in rural areas and reliant on government healthcare, the country's medical model depends on doctors willing to serve villages. Fewer rural students becoming doctors means fewer doctors likely to serve rural areas. A public health crisis beckons.
These latest protests echo a decade-old struggle, much like the Rohith Vemula movement, that questions the structural barriers embedded within India's education system.
The JEE (Joint Entrance Examination) for IITs follows the same pattern as NEET. The same forces of expensive coaching, syllabus misalignment with state boards, and an examination format that rewards specialised training have gradually squeezed out rural, local language-medium, and first-generation students.
Once inside, students from marginalised communities face a hostile environment of caste-based discrimination, social isolation, and faculty indifference. Between 2018 and 2023, more than half of all dropouts from these institutions were from SC, ST, and OBC backgrounds.
A Roadmap for Justice
The A.K. Rajan Committee recommended the total elimination of NEET in Tamil Nadu and a return to admissions based on normalised high school scores, alongside a framework for "Adversity Scores" to ensure social justice.
These recommendations acknowledged that a child from a home without a toilet faces different challenges than a child whose parents can afford to send them to a top coaching institute.
Yet despite the Tamil Nadu Assembly passing a bill to this effect twice, the President of India has withheld assent, driven by the Union Government's advice.
The refusal to address the systemic discrimination against state board students is the logical conclusion of a system that views equity as a threat to centralised power.
The Deeper Truth
Babasaheb's vision for a truly equitable India states that a society which does not educate its poor cannot call itself progressive.
Until we dismantle an education model that treats coaching as a prerequisite and rural dreams as expendable, the injustice will continue to manifest.
Anitha's dream did not die with her. It lives on in every rural student who refuses to give up. It lives on in every protester who took to the streets. And it lives on in our collective determination to build a system that never again tells a child they are worthless because of the circumstances they are born into.
The Aotearoa Alliance of Progressive Indians stands in solidarity with students fighting for equitable access to education and reaffirms its commitment to social justice in all its forms.
