Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on Wednesday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to immediately withdraw the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) for admissions to all Central universities.

Mr. Stalin argued the introduction of CUET, similar to the NEET, was “a definitive prelude to the larger attempt of the Union government to centralise higher education admissions”.

According to him, the CUET was a regressive step that will sideline the diverse school education systems across the country, grossly undermine the relevance of overall development oriented long-form learning in schools and make students rely upon coaching centres for improving their entrance examination scores.

He said any entrance examination based on the NCERT syllabus will not provide an equal opportunity to all students who have studied in varied State Board syllabi across the country. In most States, State Board syllabus students constitute more than 80% of the total student population and these students invariably hail from the marginalised sections.

“Hence, an NCERT syllabus based entrance examination would place this deserving majority in a disadvantageous position in securing admission to Central Universities. In Tamil Nadu’s context, this is likely to drastically reduce the number of students from our State in various Central Universities and their affiliated colleges,” the Chief Minister said.

“The people of Tamil Nadu are apprehensive that like NEET, CUET also will be against the interests of the rural poor and socially marginalised students from the State and will only favour further mushrooming of coaching centres in the domain of admission in humanities also,” Mr. Stalin said.

He added that the “indirect pressure” brought on by the UGC on non-Central universities to adopt CUET was likely to make the centralisation process even stronger. “This trend would, over a course of time, undermine the State syllabus based school education system by pushing students to opt for costly schools adopting NCERT syllabus,” he said.

Mr. Stalin said in view of these issues, the step to make CUET mandatory for all Central Universities was “yet another undesirable step in the current trend of the Union government trying to sideline both the roles of State governments as well as the significance of school education system in the process of admission to higher educational institutions”.