The Supreme Court asked the Centre and NTA to respond to allegations concerning the leaks in the NEET-UG examination held on May 5; it expressed the view that denial of paper leak charges was aggravating the situation. A bench headed by CJI D Y Chandrachud ordered that the NTA make full disclosure before the court pertaining to the alleged paper leak incidents, including place and timeline between leaks and the examination.
The bench, also comprising Justices J.B. Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to file a status report regarding its probe and the evidence collected. It directed the investigating officer concerned to present the material gathered with regard to when and how the alleged leak took place and from what time the question papers found their way out in the open market.
The court has also expressed its desire to utilize technology and legal options to find the wrongdoers, so that the re-examination for 23 lakh students is avoided.
The matter was adjourned for hearing on July 11.
The Centre, in an affidavit before the Supreme Court in March, had also ruled out any scrapping of the NEET-UG exam, saying such an action would wholly be unfair to the lakhs of honest candidates who appeared for the test held on May 5. The Ministry opined that without plausible and sufficient material coming to the fore relating to wide-scale breaches of confidentiality across the country, scrapping of the entire examination and its results cannot be justified. The affidavit mentioned that it will have to balance between the results of students who appeared at the examination honestly and alleged irregularities, such as cheating and impersonation, in the ongoing CBI probe.
On the issue of grace marks in the NEET-UG examination, the top court had already closed the matter after the NTA withdrew and scrapped compensatory marks that were awarded to 1,563 candidates due to loss of minutes. Such candidates were given the option to either reappear for the examination or participate in counseling based on actual scores without normalization.
