NEP Review Chief: National Entrance Exams Don't Mean Centralised Admissions

Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar, Chairman of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 Review Committee, has said that national entrance examinations such as NEET, JEE, and CUET are a prominent feature of Indian higher education. However, he added that most undergraduate admissions in the country are conducted through state, university, and institutional processes, not through national tests.

In an article titled 'Beyond NEET and JEE: Is Indian higher education truly centralised?', Kumar argued that to understand centralisation, one must look beyond who conducts the examination to who decides eligibility and merit lists, conducts counselling, and admits students. "A common national examination may centralise testing without centralising the entire admission process," he stated.

Kumar, who is also Chairman of the Board of Governors at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, shared his article on X, noting that the size of Indian higher education explains why it uses various admission processes.

Citing data from the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2023-24, the article highlighted that there are 4.5 crore students in higher education, including 3.46 crore undergraduates. Another 5.69 lakh are enrolled in integrated UG-PG programmes. Universities and their units have about 1.09 crore students across UG, PG, and PhD levels.

The AISHE records 1,289 universities or university-level institutions, 48,246 colleges, and 15,221 standalone institutions. "A system this size needs several routes to admissions," Kumar added. He further noted that state counselling, board marks, university merit lists, and institutional procedures remain widely used in India's higher education system. "These different methods make it difficult to describe the system as completely centralised," he said.

Explaining that NEET, JEE, and CUET do not operate in the same way, Kumar said NEET, a statutory common entrance examination for undergraduate medical admissions, is used by central, state, private, and deemed institutions. The Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) manages specified national seat pools, while state authorities conduct counselling for state-quota seats and apply relevant reservation, domicile, and eligibility provisions.

Regarding JEE, Kumar noted that it works differently. "IITs use JEE Advanced; JEE Main is used by the NITs, IIITs, and other government-funded technical institutions. Seats are allocated through the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA). Some states and institutions also use JEE Main scores under their own arrangements. The National Testing Agency does not allot those seats. Neither JEE Main nor Advanced is a universal requirement."

CUET also functions differently, with participating universities making admission decisions. State, deemed, and private universities often use CUET as one of several admission routes, Kumar clarified.

The former University Grants Commission chairman also highlighted several state-level entrance examination systems for engineering and other courses in states such as Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu. India uses common national tests for selected admissions and decentralised procedures for many others, he noted.