NEET-UG 2024: Supreme Court seeks to know from NTA time limit to raise grievances against OMR sheets

PTI

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 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 centres, bagpipers. They have hardly any role to play. Their obligation and duty…if they have discharged their service… that is the end of the 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 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 have not got OMR sheets.

"Normally in such matters if OMR sheets are uploaded and if there is any grievance, then 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 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 will be subject to the final outcome of the petitions and if the exams are set aside, then the counselling also will 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 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 which raised suspicion of malpractice and irregularities. The 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. In 2019 and 2020, there was one topper each while there were three toppers in 2021, one in 2022, and two in 2023.

A large number of students protested in Delhi on June 10 demanding a probe into alleged irregularities in NEET-UG 2024. They alleged that grace marks led to 67 students sharing the top rank.

Even if there was "0.001 percent negligence" on the part of anyone in the conduct of the examination, it should be thoroughly dealt with, the top court had said on June 18.

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