A day in the life of A Gomathi, an aspiring medical student from Tamil Nadu state board - Indian Express

A day in the life of A Gomathi, an aspiring medical student from Tamil Nadu state board

A second 17-yr-old has killed herself in TN after failing to clear NEET despite high marks in Class 12. Gomathi tries not to let this, the “unfair” system, and 20 hrs of 12 textbooks daily, kill her spirits

Written by Arun Janardhanan | Updated: July 7, 2018 

 Gomathi with her parents at her Chennai home. A big photo of Ambedkar and posters of star Ajith adorn the walls. (Arun Janardhanan)

The last show at INOX multiplex at Virugambakkam in Chennai ended around 1 am. Two hours later, on a narrow street behind it, A Gomathi, 17, begins her day. She doesn’t dream much while asleep, for around three hours every night, till 3 am. But her every waking moment is spent dreaming of only one thing: becoming a doctor.

Last year, Gomathi topped Class 12 at her Jaigopal Garodia Government Girls Higher Secondary School in Virugambakkam, scoring 93 per cent marks in the Biology-Mathematics stream. She had aced Class 10 too at her school, with 95 per cent marks. By now, she had hoped to be enrolled to become a doctor. However, she wasn’t among the successful candidates in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for admission to medical and dental courses, results for which came out on June 4 — among the many students in Tamil Nadu who failed, and who fear the CBSE-oriented test puts the nine lakh-plus students like them taking Class 12 exam from the state board every year at a disadvantage.

READ | NEET, JEE exams to be conducted twice a year, says Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar

In September last year, S Anitha, 17, of the state’s Ariyalur district had committed suicide when she failed to clear NEET after having scored 98 per cent marks in Class 12. Recently, another 17-year-old, Pradeepa, who had scored 94 per cent in Class 12, killed herself, in Tiruvannamalai district, after NEET failure.

Also read | As posters of ‘toppers’ go up, another 80,000 enter race for NEET at Kota

Gomathi tries not to think about this as she squats on the floor in her 400 sq ft, two-room house, beneath a large portrait of B R Ambedkar. The photograph was a gift at her wedding, smiles mother A Malathi. As Gomathi studies uninterrupted till 7.30 am, Malathi says she will keep her company, and “Ambedkar will be watching over her”.

Ambedkar shares space on that wall with half-a-dozen portraits of actor Ajith. All those belong to Gomathi’s elder brother A Manikandan, a B.Sc computer science student who is a fan of the actor.

For the next four-odd hours, in a sweltering room cooled by only a fan and lit by one bulb, as Gomathi fights sleep, tiredness and often boredom, her father R Anbazhagan, her grandmother and Manikandan sleep in a thatched-roof cottage next door.

Says Malathi, 42, “Gomathi has been following this routine since Class 10, except for 40 days of coaching provided by the state government in April.”

Anbazhagan works with a private TV showroom as a cleaner and earns around Rs 7,500 a month. “So we can’t afford to pay Rs 45,000 for NEET coaching,” Malathi says.

Parents of Tamil Nadu state board students like Malathi believe that because of this, their children can never breach the gap to NEET. Political parties in the state have questioned the decision to not take into account Class 12 results, as used to happen earlier in the state, but bank on just entrance tests for medical admissions, where children with coaching can score. With the introduction of NEET, the quota kept for Tamil Nadu in the state’s medical colleges — as well as a government quota in private medical colleges — has also ended.

At 22, Tamil Nadu has the most number of government medical colleges in the country.

At the peak of the anti-NEET protests in the state following Anitha’s suicide, the state government had announced NEET coaching centres for underprivileged students. A one-month programme was run in April this year as part of this, at nine centres. Around 3,000 students were part of these camps. Gomathi attended one such centre near Chennai, along with 400 students from 12 different districts.

In the days leading up to this year’s NEET, held on May 6, Gomathi knew there was something afoot — with protests, TV debates, and political discussions on. But, she says, she kept her mind focused on what she had to do. “I know that I may not clear NEET next year too, as I don’t have coaching. Still, I have to give it a try. Who else will try for me?” she says.

Around 7.30 am, Gomathi gets up from the floor, packs away her books and heads to the kitchen to help her mother with chores.

But the talk keeps returning to NEET. This year her score was 90 out of 720, six marks short of 96, the cut-off for Scheduled Caste students. The family is Adi Dravida. But that can’t be her benchmark, Gomathi says. “I won’t get a medical seat unless I score better.” Low marks would mean a seat only in high-paying private colleges — not an option for her.

However, she wonders, why the entrance exam asked her things she had “never learnt”. “I just cleared Class 12. You ask questions from what I learnt all these years,” Gomathi says.

Around 8.30 am, Anbazhagan leaves for work. He mostly skips breakfast so as to reach the shop as early as possible. Once in a while, when he has time and can rouse himself after a day’s work, Anbazhagan makes black coffee for Gomathi while she is studying.

As brother Manikandan leaves for his college, the private Meenakshi College of Engineering, around 9 am, Gomathi smiles wistfully, “He is lucky, he doesn’t want to become a doctor.”

Unlike him, Gomathi doesn’t have a favourite actor either. In fact, she says, while they stay next door to the multiplex, she has never been to a cinema theatre. Neither has she gone to malls or even Marina Beach. “I have seen the beach from the bus,” she says.

Her first visit to Chennai’s emerging neighbourhood, Anna Nagar, 6 km away, was when she went to write the NEET exam. Outside Chennai, she has gone to Mamallapuram, once, when in Class 5. She is not sure if she has ever seen the gates of IIT-Madras.

As the house grows quiet again, Gomathi goes back to studying. She will go on till evening, with just a lunch break in between. Most of her study material, stacked on a chair, deals with Biology. Physics and Chemistry make up the rest of the 12 textbooks.

The three-hour NEET exam has 180 questions, all multiple choice, including 90 from Biology, and 45 each from Physics and Chemistry. Gomathi says the NEET coaching provided by the government also focused on Biology. “But only 10 out of 180 questions from what we learnt at the centre came.”

Plus, she wonders, why the multiple choice questions. “Don’t writings and critical analysis help give an original answer? Shouldn’t they test that, ask my interest in becoming a doctor? Why is the government selecting MBBS students thus?” she asks.

Two students of her school who managed to clear NEET with the help of coaching also couldn’t get a medical seat, Gomathi adds. “Does all the rote learning and tricks that coaching teaches you for good scores in NEET help a doctor? Does it help a doctor do critical surgery? If the state board syllabus is at fault, why do CBSE students too need coaching?”

It’s 3 pm, and looking on at her daughter, Malathi says, “She never asks for jewels or costumes, anyway we couldn’t afford to….” Apart from the books, she adds, her daughter’s possessions include four sets of salwar-suits, two sets of school uniforms, and a new cellphone.

For the past five years, Gomathi had been getting an annual scholarship of Rs 1,800 from a private trust. “After Class 12, we decided to leave it to her to do what she wanted with it. She bought a phone. That is her only source to get information on admissions,” Malathi says.

Anbazhagan returns home late, as does Manikandan, after hanging out with friends. The TV is kept shut as Gomathi continues her studies. She says she will be up till midnight.

But she doesn’t grudge any of that, Gomathi says, nor the sleep of only three hours, nor “not having any other dreams except NEET”. What the 17-year-old wants is answers to a few more questions: “Why not provide us equal opportunity before forcing us to compete with CBSE, ICSE students? If the Prime Minister came, I would tell him, ‘I will prove myself but give us equal education before you make us write a common exam’.”

How Many Times Did Anitha Need to Prove Her Merit to an Undemocratic Education System? - The Wire

How Many Times Did Anitha Need to Prove Her Merit to an Undemocratic Education System?

BY ASIM SIDDIQUI ON 11/09/2017 • 7 COMMENTS

As elite scientific institutions ignore socio-economic realities to bypass reservation in the name of quality, students from marginalised backgrounds continue to suffer.

Students during their protest demanding justice for S. Anitha and urging the central government to ban NEET. Credit: PTI

India’s higher education system has claimed yet another Dalit life as the struggle to democratise it meets with another failure. Anitha, who excelled in the Tamil Nadu State Board high school examination, had to resort to suicide when all doors of getting a medical seat were closed on her. This resulted from the Madras high court and Supreme Court quashing the petition to exempt Tamil Nadu from the ambit of the National Entrance-cum-Eligibility Test (NEET), in which Anitha was herself an impleader.

Her death, 20 months after the suicide of Rohith Vemula at University of Hyderabad, reaffirms that there is an effort to keep higher education an exclusive domain, inaccessible and inhospitable to students from the most marginalised communities.

Anitha was aware of the ways in which higher education is becoming exclusionary. She mentioned these problems in her appeal to the Supreme Court – that it was not about her aptitude but a different syllabus that required her to take coaching classes that she could not afford. She questioned the implicit distrust of state board examinations, which results in the creation of national gatekeeping mechanisms like NEET, Indian Insutitute of Technology Joint Entrace Examination (IIT-JEE), All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE) and All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) exam in the name of standardisation.

We wouldn’t expect the high court and the Supreme Court to intentionally take decisions that aid the keeping of marginalised communities out of the higher education system. Then, under what circumstances does the judiciary play into the hands of the problematic discourse of merit that by design is exclusive in nature? Why, even after 67 years of being a constitutional republic, do we continue to fall into such traps that don’t allow the excluded groups to access opportunities of higher education?

Judiciary’s recurring blindness to ‘positive discrimination’  

To understand the root of this problem, one needs to revisit the year when the constitution of India came into operation and the petition filed by Champakam Dorairajan opposing caste-based reservation in electoral constituencies. In 1950, like 2017, it was the Madras high court and Supreme Court that took the stance that providing reservation for political and educational opportunities is in violation of Article 15 of the constitution, which prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth.

In response to this problematic reading of Article 15, the first amendment to India’s constitution was brought to encourage “positive discrimination,” and clause 4 was added to the article, which stated that “Nothing in this article or in clause (2) of Article 29 shall prevent the state from making any special provision for the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes.”

The judiciary, dominated by savarna men, has time and again shown caste and gender blindness in the name of equality while completely ignoring the lived experience of disadvantaged sections of society. This has led to a long history of mistaken judgments, like in the case of NEET.

How IITs and AIIMS have placed an unfair burden on marginalised students

Since 1950, the struggle has been to keep the spirit of this ruling alive despite efforts to challenge the democratisation of education. In the higher educational context, it begins with the focus on setting up elite institutions in science and technology, with IIT Kharagpur being set up in 1951 and AIIMS in 1956.

With the aim of nurturing the “best minds,” the entrance examination for IITs and AIIMS was devised to select “meritorious” candidates who could then be further supported. The aims of social justice were completely ignored in this endeavour as the reservation policy was introduced much later in 1973, that too with a clause that institutes of national importance can formulate their own schema instead of remaining accountable to the public.

Many elite scientific institutions continue to use this clause to completely bypass reservation in the name of quality. This fallacy of putting quality and merit in opposition to reservation has been the root of the current crisis in higher education, whose repercussions continue to fall upon the Dalit and Adivasi students.

This discourse of quality and merit in education, which is being gauged by isolated entrance examinations, does complete disservice to both the idea of merit and the constitutional aims of social justice. This dominant educational psychology, which locates intelligence in an individual, completely ignores the role of socio-economic privileges in being able to access support systems, be it nutritional, educational, economical, or social.

What more did Anitha need to do?

For a student like Anitha, a girl from Dalit background whose father is a daily wage labourer and with no mother, its evident that her access to support systems was decimal compared to a student from the middle class or an upper caste. Given the lack of a level playing field, can merit only be measured by the student’s performance in a common entrance test and not take into account the social realities that play a huge role in her access to opportunities? Despite her disadvantageous background and situation, Anitha was able to score 98% in the state board examination.

Did she still need to prove her merit by performing well in a national-level examination conducted by the CBSE board, which has a different syllabus than the state-run government schools that most disadvantaged students access? This is why Anitha petitioned the court – because she knew that adapting to NEET for young aspirants like her would involve the expensive coaching infrastructure, which they simply cannot access.

Tamil Nadu has been witnessing massive protests by students unions and youth outfits ever since the death of Anitha. Credit: PTI

She approached the court because she knew that the distrust of people like her was becoming institutionalised by exams like NEET, IIT-JEE, AIEEE and AIIMS. Even colleges like Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, which earlier admitted students based on state board results, have moved to a national-level examination. The pertinent question to ask here is why is there such an impetus for centralisation of entrance exams for higher education and what role do they actually serve?

Discrimination begins at school

Here, one needs to make a distinction between school and higher education in India because the problem lies in the cusp. In the context of schooling, there is a prevalent myth that the “quality” of government schools are bad in comparison to the private schools, and thus there has been a mass exodus to private schools for anyone who can afford.

Private schools have also tried to moderate their fees to attract lower classes who see education as the only promise of a better future. Although there has been enough research to challenge this myth by comparing the learning levels of students from both government and private schools, it persist.

However, when it comes to higher education, there is no doubt that public universities like IITs, AIIMS, Indian Institutes of Management, Jawaharlal Nehru University, University of Hyderabad and Delhi University are coveted institutions for most aspiring students.

This also has to do with the spending of educational budget, where the lion’s share goes to few institutes of higher education while neglecting primary and secondary education. The option to exit the public institutions for a more exclusive private one is not available in the higher educational space. Thus, while government schools have been exited by the upper castes on the pretext of quality, and any attempt to democratise private schools through the Right to Education is met with stiff opposition, exiting public universities in a similar fashion is not an option. Hence, the stakes are elevated in claiming the higher educational space, and only reservation policies continue to provide a glimmer of hope for democratising these spaces. The only way to subvert this democratic aim is by putting more roadblocks, such as that of gatekeeping examinations, which would eventually tire out the marginalised communities in their struggle to enter public spaces.

Anitha was at this cusp between school and higher education, and the promise of transforming her life by getting into a government medical college was real. With state board examination results, she would have easily secured a seat in a premium college. However, that would have only been the beginning of a long struggle inside the campus where reservation is used as an excuse to undermine one’s merit and the place they deserve in a university.

The 2007 Thorat Committee report explicates the magnitude of caste discrimination in elite institutions like AIIMS where not only students but also faculty from SC/ST background are continually excluded in the garb of being non-meritorius and undeserving.

A file photo shows parents of the students preparing for medical entrance exams forming a human chain to protest NEET. Credit: PTI

I observed a similar discrimination during my undergraduate studies at IIT Delhi where I saw an elaborate framework of ‘graded inequality’, to use Ambedkar’s conception of caste, at play based on the all India ranking (AIR). This AIR, which is different for general and reserved seats, along with one’s socio-geographic location, known from one’s name, appearance and spoken language, would determine the graded respect one commanded in social life. With an utter disregard towards social justice, savarna students would continually humiliate SC/ST/minority students by employing the (false) merit argument, eventually making the higher educational space hostile for them.

Many such students who have been unable to tolerate this undignified life have resorted to committing suicide. This is viewed as a weakness of that individual to not be able to cope with the high standards of the university, further reifying the anti-reservation stance.

Amebdkar knew that the biggest challenge to democratisation of India is the graded hierarchy of caste and gender, and therefore, without annihilating caste, all our efforts would boil down to nothing. However, instead of dealing with caste directly we have only managed to hide the exclusion through the discourse of ‘individual’ merit. Generations then accumulate this privilege. Public universities have become the most contested spaces as they allow for the possibility of democratising exclusive spaces and becoming exemplars for the society.

However, what we have seen with Anitha, Vemula and many others is that all our attempts towards democratisation are constantly demolished by Brahminical appropriation of merit and quality. To annihilate these new mechanisms of exclusion and truly democratise the universities, we need to challenge the gatekeeping examinations and anti-reservation rhetoric that continue to undermine constitutional ideals. Such discourse simply has no place in the republic of India.

Asim Siddiqui teaches philosophy at Azim Premji University, Bangalore.

It's Time To Kill NEET And Return Education To The State List - Huffington Post

It's Time To Kill NEET And Return Education To The State List

We as a nation owe an apology to Anitha.

04/09/2017 4:49 PM IST | 

G Pramod Kumar Contributing Editor, HuffPost India

          HINDUSTAN TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

There's a lot of anger and anguish that's still erupting in Tamil Nadu over the suicide of Anitha, the Dalit girl who was the visible face of the state's resistance to the central government's national medical entrance examination, the NEET.

For Anitha and thousands of meritorious students like her, who would have otherwise gotten into medical schools, what was snatched away was their hard-earned sovereign right to higher education in an increasingly centralising India.

In a "Union of States", where the architects of our Constitution had rightly ensured that the states had sufficient autonomy to manage their affairs, instruments such as NEET is an anomaly. In the case of Anitha, it was also a symbol for the tyranny of the Centre that took away what rightfully belonged to her and the states. NEET was a strange beast that young people such as Anitha were unable to figure out because her education under the Tamil Nadu Uniform System of School Education (Samacheer Kalvi) was not meant for an unsuitable evaluation of her merit at a national level. NEET was ugly and scary for her and thousands of others.

The Centre Cannot Control Education In States

Presently, NEET is one of the biggest injustices in India's uneven education system. It has created an inappropriate filter that doesn't find real merit, but lets only those with special entitlements pass through. Getting these entitlements, such as crash-training in cracking MCQ requires access to an expensive, premium coaching that people such as Anitha in the hinterlands of India cannot afford. If states such as Tamil Nadu had been able to expand the access to education even to the remotest areas because of years of hard work, filters such as NEET mercilessly roll them back.

Education cannot be taken out of the linguistic, socio-cultural and autonomous context of Indian states.

There was a purpose why the Constitution had left subjects such as education and health - the pillars of human development - with the state government. And that's precisely why every the Indian state has its own "state board" for school education and appropriate syllabi. Education cannot be taken out of the linguistic, socio-cultural and autonomous context of Indian states. In fact, the Kothari Commission, that was convened in the 1960s to advise on education in the country, wanted education to remain with the state despite its recommendation for a nationwide standardisation.

Kerala, the jewel in India's human development story, made all its early strides in education with this autonomy, and Tamil Nadu has produced high quality doctors, surgeons, engineers, scientists and academics with its own educational system and premier institutions. But when it came to NEET, Kerala topped the list in South India with 79.77 pass percentage, while Tamil Nadu fell to the bottom with 41 per cent.

The reason was not quality or merit, but access. This is how unjust NEET is.

Politics Surrounding NEET

Had former Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa been alive, Anitha probably wouldn't have died. Jaya had clearly understood the need for autonomy in education and the unsuitability of entrance examinations in her state. She abolished them in 2005 and had vowed to put an end to NEET if she came back to power in 2016. Although she did return to power, she was mostly sick, and had passed away at a crucial time. Jaya had even promised new legislation if things didn't work. But her legacy-holders - the splintered AIADMK that is obsequious to the BJP-ruled centre for power and safety - are hardly interested.

Even without entrance examinations, Tamil Nadu still tops the country in both quality and numbers of technical talent. Its Anna University campus, which doesn't have an entrance test, is as prestigious and coveted as the IIT in Chennai, and about 1.2 crore students study under Samacheer Kalvi.

A subject in the concurrent list makes both the Centre and the state equal partners, but given the Centre's constitutional upper hand, it never works that way. NEET is a classic example.

Joining the statewide protests against Anitha and NEET, DMK leader MK Stalin has promised to bring education back to the state list and ensure that nobody meets with Anitha's fate again in Tamil Nadu. DMK had been among the most vociferous voices for state autonomy in its early years, but has long since watered down its policy thanks to its opportunistic alliances with national parties that ruled Delhi.

Had DMK been serious, it could have blocked NEET because it was a creation of the UPA. As Jaya once said, the DMK even had a second chance when the UPA government chose to appeal against a Supreme Court verdict that abolished NEET in 2013. In fact, it was during the same time, that Kapil Sibal, the then human resources development minister had developed such fancy ideas of unified screening tests for a complexly diverse country (common entrance exam for all engineering colleges across India that receive some funding from government of India). Creating such standards to national institutions is understandable, but imposing them on state institutions that are built on a different understanding of social justice and development ethic was totally insane. In terms of character, it's similar to the imposition of Hindi, that Tamil Nadu rose against and defeated on multiple occasions.

The only way to escape this absolutist injustice is to bring education back to the state list

In fact, most of the blame for today's mess should go to the Congress because it was Indira Gandhi who shifted education, which had been constitutionally part of the state list, to the concurrent list in 1976. The brutal suzerainty of emergency ensured that there was neither consultations with the states nor, resistance from them. Evidently, the Swaran Singh Committee that recommended such a move because the government then thought education required national policies, reflected Indira Gandhi's emergency ethos of a centralised India. A subject in the concurrent list makes both the Centre and the state equal partners, but given the Centre's constitutional upper hand, it never works that way. NEET is a classic example.

The Way Forward

The only way to escape this absolutist injustice is to bring education back to the state list, a larger campaign for retaining the constitutionally guaranteed autonomy of the states in letter and spirit. It needs icons such as Jaya, who defiantly stood up for the rights of the states. In a country which has Orissa and Kerala - and BIMARU states and southern India - at the two ends of the diverse development spectrum, one size doesn't fit all. Imposing such one sizes is to disincentivise good governance and innovation by enterprising states, and to pull all of them down to sub Saharan standards.

As Jawaharlal Nehru said in his Discovery of India, "India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads." He even called it a "myth and an idea" (Salman Rushdie also said something similar). The constitution embodied this reality, but politics of hegemony chooses to ignore it.

Finally, the NEET-advocates must learn from a tiny Cuba, that's as small as Uttarakhand in terms of population. It doesn't have NEET or any such unreasonable screens, but trains doctors by the thousands, half of them from different parts of the world. They deploy doctors all over the world where they need them, whether it's an Ebola-hit Liberia, where nobody wanted to go, or a Quake-hit Pakistan. It runs world-class institutions in rich countries such as Qatar and poor countries such as Timor Leste.

 Majority of their graduates end up serving government institutions, and hence the poor, because of the value system that they imbibe during their education. (Cuban model also calls for free medical education)

In comparison, in India, absurd centralist policies are killing its homegrown advantages, and the people such as Anitha who co-create them.

Anitha suicide: Death of drowntrodden common in unequal society, says filmmaker Pa Ranjith - India Today

Anitha suicide: Death of drowntrodden common in unequal society, says filmmaker Pa Ranjith

Ranjith, who is also the director of Rajinikanth's Kabali and Kaala stated that the death of down trodden people in a society which is unequal is unfortunately common.

Pramod Madhav

 | Edited by Bijin Jose

Chennai, September 2, 2017 | UPDATED 17:40 IST

HIGHLIGHTS

• Pa Ranjith said that death of downtrodden people was common in an unequal society.
  
• Anitha, an MBBS aspirant, ended her life on Friday.
  
• Ranjith also slammed state and Central governments.

Following the footsteps of superstars Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, noted filmmaker Pa Ranjith too has come forward to express grief over the  suicide of Ariyalur Dalit girl Anitha .

Ranjith, who is also the director of Rajinikanth's Kabali and Kaala stated that the death of downtrodden people in a society which is unequal is unfortunately common.

Anitha, an MBBS aspirant, ended her life on Friday after discovering that she cannot become a doctor due to the introduction of National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET) exams.

Anita scored 1,176 marks out of 1200 in class 12 and a cutoff over 196. Had there been no NEET exams, she could have easily got into a medical college.

However, the introduction of NEET even after the state government's continuous promise to get exemptions, Anitha got 86 for 700. Anitha took forward the legal fight against NEET stating that a common exam is unconstitutional when the downtrodden are not given equal chance.

But, after the Supreme Court's verdict and the poor coordination of the State government, it became evident that Tamil Nadu cannot get exemption from NEET anymore.

Anitha was a daughter of a daily wager and could not afford any special coaching or did not have more chances.

Pa Ranjith, who went to Ariyalur to pay his last respects to Anitha claimed said, "even after acquiring very good marks in class 10 and class 12 her dreams were shattered as more harsh weapons like NEET were being created. The main objective seems to be like curb the entry of the downtrodden into institutions just like IIT."

The Kaala director stated that an innocent girl decided to take her life after battling all the odds and coming to realise that she cannot succeed. He sad that the incident only raised the question as to for whom does the government function.

Countless protests were seen all across the state by student bodies and political parties and the blame has fallen upon both the state and Central governments. Protestors claimed that false hope was given to children about NEET.

Also Read:

Anitha suicide: Protests erupt in Tamil Nadu, DMK slams Central government

Anitha suicide: Tamil outfit demands scrapping of NEET as politicians make a beeline to pay homage

NEET suicide: Tamil superstars express grief over Anitha's death

WATCH | Anitha suicide: Massive protests in Tamil Nadu against NEET