NEET row: Supreme Court seeks NTA response on time limit for OMR sheet grievances

Tribune News Service

Satya Prakash

New Delhi, June 27

The Supreme Court on Thursday sought to know from the National Testing Agency (NTA) if there was any time limit for raising grievances regarding OMR sheets. While hearing a petition filed by a coaching institute raising concerns about giving OMR sheets to students who had appeared for NEET-UG 2024, a Vacation Bench of Justice Manoj Misra and Justice SVN Bhatti wondered why a coaching institute should be approaching the top court under Article 32 of the Constitution.

“This is an Article 32 petition at the instance of a coaching centre. What fundamental right of yours is violated?” the Bench asked. Article 32 empowers a person to directly approach the Supreme Court for protection of fundamental rights.

“This is one of the reasons where we see this role played by the coaching centre bagpipers. They have hardly any role to play. Their obligation and duty…if they have discharged their service… that is the end of matter. They have not undertaken to see that everything that Centre is supposed to do will be taken care of by them,” the Bench said.

However, issuing a notice to the NTA on a fresh plea filed by ‘Xylem Learning Private Limited’ and some NEET candidates, the Bench clubbed the matter with other pending petitions scheduled to be heard on July 8 after senior counsel R Basant submitted on behalf of the petitioners that some NEET candidates had not got OMR sheets.

“Normally in such matters, if the OMR sheets are uploaded and if there is any grievance, there is a time limit,” the Bench said. Basant submitted that there was no set procedure or time limit to raise the grievance and, therefore, as an interim relief, the candidates were seeking grant of OMR sheets.

The NTA counsel told the Bench that OMR sheets had been uploaded on the website and given to candidates and that he would check it up. Earlier, the top court had refused to defer the counselling/seat allotment process, which is scheduled to begin on July 6. Besides this, the Court had also orally observed that the admissions would be subject to the final outcome of the petitions and if the exams were set aside, counselling would also get invalidated consequentially.

Amid allegations of paper leak and other malpractices in NEET-UG 2024, the top court had earlier this month issued notices to the Centre, NTA and others on petitions seeking scrapping of UG-NEET 2024 and a court-monitored CBI probe into the paper leak.

Following scrapping of the grace marks given on account of loss of time to 1,563 NEET-UG 2024 candidates, they were given an option of appearing again on June 23 for the test to secure admission to MBBS, BDS and other courses.

Around 24 lakh students had 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.

As many as 67 students got a perfect score of 720 out of 720 and some of the Rank 1 holders had the same sequence of roll numbers. A majority of them were from the same examination centres in Rajasthan (11), Tamil Nadu (8), Maharashtra (7), Haryana (6) and four each from Andhra Pradesh and Bihar.

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