NEET-UG 2024: Supreme Court orders Director, IIT-Delhi, to set up expert panel to submit correct answer to a controversial question
Satya Prakash
New Delhi, July 22
The Supreme Court on Monday asked the Director of IIT-Delhi to set up a three-member expert committee to find out the correct answer to a controversial multiple choice question in the NEET-UG 2024 examination and report to it by Tuesday noon
The order came from a three-judge Bench led by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud after some aspirants pointed out that a particular question related to “atom” and its characteristics had two correct answers and the National Testing Agency (NTA) awarded four marks to examinees who gave one particular answer out of the two correct ones.
As the petitioners contended that it would have a significant impact on the final merit list, the CJI said that in order to resolve the issue as regards the correct answer an expert opinion should be sought from IIT Delhi.
“We request the Director of IIT-Delhi to constitute a team of three experts of the subject concerned. The expert team constituted by the Director is requested to formulate the opinion on the correct option and remit the opinion to the Registrar by 12 noon tomorrow,” the top court said.
As the hearing on petitions seeking scrapping of NEET-UG 2024 Examination for alleged paper leak and other malpractices remained inconclusive, the Bench will resume it on Tuesday.
At the outset of the hearing on Monday, the Bench asked the petitioners seeking cancellation of the May 5 test to demonstrate a “systemic failure” in conducting the examination and provide data based on complete results made available by the NTA to establish that the question paper leak was “widespread”.
Senior advocate Narender Hooda, representing petitioners seeking cancellation of NEET-UG 2024, said that the paper leak happened at least two days before the May 5 exam as opposed to the Centre’s claim that the leak occurred hours before the examination.
Hooda said the entire system run by the NTA was fragile, having many loopholes and it did not inspire any confidence in it. He said at various stages of the examination it was run by employees of private schools who performed the roles of City Coordinators, Centre Superintendents and invigilators. Hooda pointed out that there was no time fixed for sealing of OMR sheets after the examination and the filing of OMR sheets after the examination can’t be ruled out.
However, noting that there was no material on record so far to show that the leak was widespread, the Bench said the instances of wrongdoing were in Patna and Hazaribagh which were not sufficient to indicate a systemic failure.
“Now show us the data. At the end of it, even if we assume that problems happened, we are looking at the whole country. Show us the data to say that it was widespread,” the Bench told Hooda.
It asked the NTA to submit a note on grant of grace marks and time to certain categories of students in Jhajjar and other places where “wrong” question papers were distributed.
On behalf of NTA, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta rejected the allegations of a “systemic failure”, asserting that it was wrong to suggest the examination process was vitiated in the entire country.
The top court has repeatedly 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”.
On July 18, the Supreme Court had directed the NTA to declare by Saturday 12 noon the centre and city-wise results of NEET-UG 2024 after masking the identities of candidates.
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).
