Supreme Court clears all decks for the language's inclusion as a medium for test
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After consistent efforts of the Students' Islamic Organisation (SIO) for the past couple of months, the Supreme Court on Thursday finally ordered inclusion of Urdu in the list of languages for the National Entrance and Eligibility Test (NEET) from the next academic year.
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The organisation had moved the court after the Central government had excluded the language. However, SIO's demand of including it from this academic year remains unfulfilled.
Govt's call angered many
Last year on December 28, mid-day had reported about how the Central government's decision to not make NEET available in Urdu drew a lot of criticism and had even angered the minority community to a greater extent (Read report — Govt's decision to exclude Urdu from NEET invites criticism).
Thereafter, the SIO as well as the state government had written to the Centre about it, but when they did not receive any positive response, the organization moved the SC. The SIO had argued that a huge number of students from across the country study in Urdu and hence a national level test should not exclude it. In Maharashtra alone, there are over 160 Urdu-medium junior colleges.
Arbitrary move
Speaking to mid-day, state secretary of the SIO Mohammad Ali said, "It was clearly an arbitrary and discriminatory decision of the government. We were confident of this win, as the constitution would not have allowed this. The Central government refused to accept our demands even after the state government backed it (Read mid-day report – Maharashtra now backs demand for NEET in Urdu too)."
He further said, "It certainly would have been better if it was included from this academic year. But we welcome the apex court's decision."
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