THE National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) UG is the single common entrance examination for admission in MBBS and BDS courses across the country. The admission notification which was supposed to be out in December for the last academic session, is still pending. Aspirants are eagerly waiting for the application procedure to begin as they would not get enough  time to prepare, if the examination is conducted in the month of May, as it was the case last year.

We at PaGaLGuY have listed four major reasons that is possibly resulting in the delay for the admission process to begin this year.

1. Inclusion of regional languages in the NEET:

The Health Ministry, in the month of December 2016 , declared that the examination will take place this year in 6 regional languages along with English and Hindi. The decision was not taken well by various states for not including their language in the list and they mounted pressure to rethink about inclusion of other languages. As of now there is no official confirmation about adding other languages, but media reports suggest that Odia and Kannada can get included as language options for NEET 2017.

2. Deliberation about the syllabus normalization:

Syllabus of state board and CBSE/ICSE students differ in various parts of the country. To force one set of students to take up NEET in completely different syllabus with different pattern of questions will be unfair. Hence, there must be deliberations going on with the syllabus of the examination as well, resulting in delay.

3. Whether to put a cap on NEET attempts:

The news of capping NEET attempts have surfaced recently, resulting in an air of doubt and confusion amongst the medical aspirants across the country. While a section of medical students is supporting the idea, others are excoriating it by terming it useless. The official notification will only be able to disclose about the number of attempts one could undergo.

4. Proper counselling schedules:

CBSE and MCI were left red faced when last year they couldn’t fill more than 2000 medical seats due to haphazard counselling that followed by NEET. The Supreme court verdicts and the respective state medical authority orders made the situation utterly complex for the medical aspirants and many of them lost their seats in process. Taking lessons from the last year, there must be proper planning that is undergoing for a smoother and transparent counselling procedure, resulting in delay in the beginning of the application procedure.