In a relief for students preparing for competitive examinations, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced that there is no proposal to merge NEET, UG and CUET. 

The Union Education Minister was speaking at an event where he was interacting with students in Kota, Rajasthan, as stated in a tweet by All India Radio News, the official and verified Twitter handle of News Services Division, All India Radio. 

The announcement by the University Grants Commission Chairman M Jagadesh Kumar that a merger of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET), the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and the Common Universities Entrance Test (CUET) was being considered had sent shockwaves through the student and educators community. This happened last month.

While some welcomed the proposal, upon the same reasoning stated by the UGC Chairman that a single exam will help students by preventing them from having to write multiple exams, its critics have banked on the recent grave issues that have plagued these three exams and their conduct this year. 

All three exams are conducted by the National Testing Agency. This year the UGC made the CUET mandatory for admission into undergraduate courses in central university, and more than 14 lakh students signed up to write the exam which has been mired in controversy due to technical and administrative shortcomings of the NTA.

Calling it a massive exercise, Kumar had told PTI that an expert committee will be set up by the end of this month, which will study all important entrance exams being conducted in the country and abroad. He said that the committee also needed to address the difficulty level in the syllabi, as each discipline "has its own peculiarities." 

In the interview with Times of India, Kumar said that the single test made sense since students wrote similar subjects across the exams, including Math, Physics, Chemistry for Engineering (JEE),  Biology, Physics Chemistry for NEET and a selection of up to 10 subjects in CUET.