On Monday, the Indian Supreme Court (SC) will consider many petitions pertaining to the NEET UG 2024 scandal, requesting an order to retake the exam. A bench consisting of Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, along with Chief Justice DY Chandrachud, will consider a total of 38 petitions.
Without evidence of a widespread breach of confidentially, the Central government and the National Testing Agency (NTA), which administers NEET-UG, informed the Supreme Court that eliminating the exam would “seriously jeopardise” lakhs of sincere applicants.
“It is also submitted that at the same time, in the absence of any proof of any large-scale breach of confidentiality in a pan-India examination…scrapping the exam in entirety would seriously jeopardise the lakhs of honest candidates who attempted the question paper in 2024,” the ministry had said.
Reiterating the Center’s position, the NTA claimed that cancelling the exam in its whole would be extremely “counterproductive” and seriously “harmful to larger public interest,” particularly with regard to the candidates’ professional aspirations.
“It is submitted that if the entire examination process is cancelled without there being any tangible factors warranting such actions it would be highly detrimental to the larger public interest involving the academic career of lakhs of students who have attempted the examination fairly without any wrongdoing or even an allegation of wrongdoing,” the NTA said.
Students and political groups have been protesting and mediating the NTA and the Union education ministry because of suspected widespread malpractices during the test on May 5, including question paper leaks and impersonation.
The Union education ministry and the NTA have responded to the petitions requesting the cancellation of the exam, a retest, and a court-monitored probe into all associated matters by submitting separate affidavits to the Supreme Court.
Over 2.3 million candidates took the exam across 4,750 locations in 571 cities, and according to the ministry and the NTA, there is no proof that there was a serious breach of confidentially.
A high-level expert committee appointed by the government has also been tasked with coming up with practical solutions to ensure that the NTA’s examinations are transparent, easy to navigate, and equitable.
The scandal began when six students from a Haryana centre were among the 67 pupils who achieved an extraordinary perfect score of 720. This was caused by claims that grace markings existed. On July 1, the NTA released an update to the NEET-UG results, which saw the top rankers drop from 67 to 61.
