Fate of around 24 lakh candidates hangs in balance as Supreme Court to hear on Monday petitions seeking cancellation of NEET-UG 2024 exam
Satya Prakash
New Delhi, July 21
The fate of around 24 lakh candidates hangs in balance as the Supreme Court will on Monday take up petitions seeking cancellation of NEET-UG 2024 Examination held on May 5 for alleged paper leak and other malpractices.
A Bench led by CJI DY Chandrachud – which had on July 18 directed the National Testing Agency (NTA) to declare by Saturday 12 noon the centre and city-wise results of NEET-UG 2024 after masking the identities of candidate – will take up the matter on July 22.
The NTA has already complied with the order. Out of the 494 candidates who appeared in the NEET-UG Exam at a centre in Bahadurgarh town in Jhajjar district of Haryana, 15 students obtained marks above 600 (between 606 and 682).
Some successful candidates have also moved the top court opposing petitions seeking cancellation of NEET-UG 2024 Exam.
Senior counsel Narender Hooda had on July 18 submitted on behalf of the petitioners that in the absence of complete city-wise and centre-wise results the petitioners were handicapped in pointing out discrepancies in NEET-UG 2024 and that publishing the entire results on the website by the NTA will bring about transparency on the centre wise marks obtained by candidates.
The Bench – which also included Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice Manoj Misra had rejected repeated requests made by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta that the names of cities and centres should also be masked.
On the basis of a technical analysis of NEET-2024 data carried out by experts from IIT Madras, the Centre had told the Supreme Court that there was no indication of mass malpractice or local set of candidates being benefitted. The NTA too has opposed cancellation of the May 5 test.
However, Hooda had said that unless the petitioners were given access to the entire city-wise and centre-wise results of NEET-UG 2024, they would be unbale to contest and contradict the claims made by the Centre on the basis of the technical analysis of NEET-2024 data carried out by experts from IIT Madras.
AS Hooda cited a Bihar Police report to assert that the paper was leaked a day before the May 5 test and it could be widespread, the Bench had ordered that “The material collected by the Bihar Police through the investigation and the report of the Economic Offences Wing of Bihar Police, before the investigation was taken over by the Central Bureau of Investigation, shall be filed with the Court Master by 5.00 p.m. on 20 July 2024.”
The Bench will also peruse the CBI’s status report on the probe before taking a call on petitions seeking scrapping of the May 5 test.
The top court has already made it clear that any order for conducting the NEET-UG 2024 afresh has to be based on the concrete evidence that the sanctity of the entire examination was widely affected.
Around 24 lakh students appeared for NEET-UG 2024 Examination conducted on May 5 by the NTA across 4,750 centres in 511 cities and 14 centres abroad for admission to MBBS, BDS, AYUSH and other related courses in more than 700 government and private institutions to fill 1.08 lakh seats.
Both the Centre and the NTA—which conducts the NEET-UG test – have opposed scrapping the examination. While the Centre maintained that scrapping the entire examination would seriously jeopardise lakhs of honest candidates who didn’t adopt any unfair means, the NTA said cancellation of the exam “would be hugely counterproductive and significantly harmful to the larger public interest, especially to the career prospects of the qualified candidates”.
