West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Tuesday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi asking for the Centre to file a review petition in the Supreme Court against its order to conduct Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) and National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) in September.

She has urged for the Prime Minister’s intervention to postpone the examinations “so that students are free from mental agony and mental disaster.”

Banerjee’s request comes in the backdrop of the coronavirus disease that has infected as many as 31,67,323 people in the country and has claimed over 58,000 lives.

Also read| Clamour grows around postponement of JEE, NEET; Greta Thunberg favours students: Latest developments

“Such intervention is very much essential in the larger interest of students to facilitate creating a situation whereby the students will neither be subjected to grave health risk nor they will face a career risk,” she wrote in the letter.

The chief minister has asked the Prime Minister to consider taking necessary steps for postponing the JEE and NEET exams “until the public health situation becomes conducive again.”

Earlier in the day, Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik wrote to Union education minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank seeking postponement of the entrance exams. It would be highly unsafe and perilous for 50,000 students of the state to visit the test centres physically to appear in these tests, he said.

On Monday, Banerjee had written to PM Modi about her reservations against the UGC guidelines that required completing terminal examinations in universities/colleges across the country by the end of September 2020. “My point was that this decision had a huge potential to put students’ lives at risk,” she said.

The Supreme Court had on August 17 rejected a plea seeking postponement of these exams saying a crucial year of students “cannot be wasted” and life has to go on.

Over 16 lakh students have registered for NEET this year and nearly 9.3 lakh students had registered for JEE-Mains (Paper I) that was held in January. An equal number of students were expected to appear for the second phase of the exam, which are scheduled for April-May each year.