States prepare for the JEE (Main) exam today
NEW DELHI: States such as Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Rajasthan will offer free travel to students appearing in the Joint Entrance Examination (Main), or JEE (Main), this week. Others such as Bihar and Odisha will deploy additional security forces outside examination centres to enforce social distancing norms. JEE (Main), for admission to engineering colleges including the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), is to be held over September 1-6. It’s the first major nationwide entrance test being held since the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) started spreading wider in early March. Although several oppositionruled states have opposed the conduct of the exam at a time when the pandemic is still raging, all have made elaborate arrangements for the test. Around a million students have enrolled for appearing in the exam across the country. The National Testing Agency (NTA), overseeing the test, has issued detailed guidelines for conducting the exam including sanitization of examination rooms, maintaining a minimum distance of two metres between two tables and mandatory temperature checks on each student. Students, who for the first time they will give an examination with gloves on, should not panic; they need to be careful and read the guidelines in detail, said Ashish Arora, head of academics at Jaipur-based Allen Career Institute. All students have been asked to come to the examination centre at least an hour before scheduled start of the exam. “The children need to be calm at the centres as the movement inside the centres would be slow,” Arora said. Ajay Singh, manager of the Uniconcept examination centre in Patna, said the students should take care to maintain social distancing. A Patna official said an adequate number of district magistrates and police personnel would be deployed to prevent gatherings outside exam halls. The Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation released a list of hotels and lodges in the city to help students and their parents to find accommodation; in Ganjam district, buses have been provided to ferry students. Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Monday said the state government has arranged free transport for students taking JEE (Main) and the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET). The governments of West Bengal, Kerala and Punjab, which had opposed holding the JEE and other Central entrance examinations, directed their transport departments to arrange buses for students to reach examination centres.