On Monday, a petition was been filed in the Supreme Court by a group of 26 MBBS doctors seeking the postponement of the Institutes of National Importance Combined Entrance Test (INICET), which is scheduled to be conducted by All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) on June 16, 2021.
The plea states that “the same testing authority, which is to conduct INI CET, had declared postponement of the B.Sc. and M.Sc. Nursing Exams, just about 24 hours before declaring that INI CET will be conducted on 16th June 2021. This step-motherly attitude towards the doctors is completely uncalled for. Further, the 10th and 12th Standard examinations have been cancelled which itself shows that the Government is conscious of the fact that the deadly virus is a threat amongst the younger population. A typical age bracket of doctors appearing for INI CET would be 24 to 28 years thereby being in an extremely vulnerable section also as a result of being in close proximity and attending to COVID-19 patients.”
Moreover, many doctors are not fully vaccinated and many have not even received the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
The conduction of this examination is ‘tantamount to endangering the lives’ of thousands of doctors who are working on the frontline in different hospitals.
The conduction of examination is not in the public interest as given the present condition of the country and the non-availability of doctors, beds in the hospitals coupled with the fact that there is a dearth of COVID-19 vaccination, the plea said.
Many doctors have taken a job or duty in a State which is not their own, and also many of them were preparing for their PG examinations. However, when the assurance from the Prime Minister’s Office came, a lot of them took jobs/duties other than their own States and became frontline workers.
The plea reiterated since there is not enough time for most of them to travel back in order to take the examinations and they are most likely to be affected by travel restrictions as imposed by different states.
This puts an undue burden on already fatigued, distressed, and tired doctors, the plea added.
The petition avers, “with the positivity rate in India being 20+% and in some places it is as high as 50%, more than 80,000 doctors will be appearing for INI-CET. A conservative assumption that about 10% are infected, this will itself show the difficulty in arranging for beds and life support for nearly 8,000 doctors who will be taking this examination.”