Supreme Court to hear petitions seeking scrapping of NEET-UG today

New Delhi, July 21

The Supreme Court will on Monday take up petitions seeking cancellation of the NEET-UG 2024 over alleged paper leak and other irregularities.

A Bench led by CJI DY Chandrachud, which had on the previous hearing directed the National Testing Agency (NTA) to declare centre and city-wise results of the medical entrance test, will hear the matter.

The NTA has already complied with the order. Some successful candidates have also moved the top court opposing petitions seeking cancellation of the exam.

Senior counsel Narender Hooda had on July 18 submitted on behalf of the petitioners that in the absence of a detailed result, the petitioners were handicapped in pointing out discrepancies in the NEET-UG and that publishing the entire result on the website by the NTA would bring about transparency on the marks obtained by candidates.

The Bench, which 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-UG 2024 data 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 unless the petitioners were given access to the entire city-wise and centre-wise result, they would be unbale to contest and contradict the claims made by the Centre on the basis of the technical analysis.

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 top court has already made it clear that any order for conducting the NEET-UG exam afresh had to be based on the concrete evidence that the sanctity of the entire examination was widely affected.

Toppers not just from coaching hubs: Govt

• The Education Ministry said on Sunday that students from across the country, and not just those from coaching hubs, had been able to score 700 marks and above in the NEET-UG exam
• “Such a large spread of top scorers shows that many candidates who were not from the traditional tuition hubs were also able to come in the toppers list in NEET 2024,” the ministry said
• The ministry claimed that the reason behind the rise in the number of students scoring well was due to its decision of aligning the syllabus of NEET with that of higher secondary