Can’t allow even 0.001% negligence in NEET: SC

New Delhi The Supreme Court on Monday told the Centre and the National Testing Agency (NTA) not to shy away from admitting any mistake in conducting the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) this year and cautioned that even 0.001% negligence should be thoroughly dealt with, underlining the chaos engulfing India’s premier medical entrance examination that threatens to jeopardise the futures of hundreds of thousands of children.

A vacation bench of justices Vikram Nath and SVN Bhatti was listening to 32 candidates seeking cancellation of the May 5 test over allegations of paper leak, malpractice, manipulation of examination centres, and discrepancies in declaration of results.

The court issued notice and posted it along with a raft of similar petitions on the issue on July 8.

“We all know the labour children have put in for this examination. You must stand firm. If there is a mistake, you must say that we admit the mistake as that will inspire confidence in the system. It should not be taken as an adversarial litigation,” said the court.

“Even if there is 0.001% negligence on the part of anyone, it should be thoroughly dealt with,” the bench told advocate Kanu Agarwal appearing for the Centre and advocate Vardhaman Kaushik for NTA.

For weeks, protests have swept across India as thousands of students hit the streets against this year’s process amid allegations of question paper leaks, inflated marking and arbitrary allowance of grace marks, even as opposition parties called for a Supreme Court-monitored probe into the allegations. “Narendra Modi, as usual, is maintaining silence on the tampering with the future of more than 24 lakh students in the NEET examination,” senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said in a post on X in Hindi.

The government has repeatedly said it will not tolerate malpractice and irregularities but also ruled out scrapping the entire examination over what it calls were problems in a handful of centres. Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Sunday said that the initial information was that some students were given grace marks due to less time. “...some irregularities have come to light at two places. I assure the students and parents that the government has taken this seriously. We have received the information and we will take all the issues to a decisive stage,” Pradhan had said.

This year’s NEET has been shrouded in controversy after allegations surfaced that in one centre in Rajasthan, students appearing for the Hindi medium test got question papers in English amid reports of torn OMR sheets and delay in distribution of question papers. A case was lodged in Patna over an alleged paper leak, after which the police arrested 13 people involved in solving question papers and supplying answers as part of a racket. The arrested people include four examinees.

At least 10 petitions have been filed in the top court since then. Almost all of them will be heard on July 8 by a bench likely headed by Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud.

In all 2.4 million students sat for the examination at 4,750 centres spread across 571 cities around the world.

“Imagine a person who has played fraud on the system, such a person getting admission to the course and becoming a doctor is more deleterious to the society,” the court said on Tuesday.

The Centre told the court that no opinion should be formed before NTA and Centre submit their response on July 8. “The court may not come to a conclusion yet and await what the Centre has to say,” Agarwal said. The bench replied, “We want timely action from you. It needs to be checked how many mobiles were used. Rarely does the court react. And during vacations, we tend to react slowly.”

The exchange came days after the top court allowed the Centre to scrap grace marks awarded to 1,563 students and conduct a fresh test for them. The students were given the option of appearing for the fresh exam on June 23, or retain their actual scores without the grace marks.

But this addressed only a small fraction of the problems roiling NEET this year, primary among which is the fact that 67 people scored a perfect 720, up from two in 2023 and zero in 2022. Junking grace marks removed six people from this list of 67. Other apparent inconsistencies — 44 students getting marks because of discrepancies in old and new physics textbooks, or inflated marking that has skewed the percentiles — remained unaddressed.

On Tuesday, the court also issued notice on another petition by candidate Nitin Vijay on grace marks due to loss of time and a question in the Physics paper. The bench told NTA, “Be prepared for the award of grace marks to 1563 candidates. There is a lot of opposition coming for that too.”

The 1,563 candidates who got grace marks complained that they did not get the stipulated 3 hours and 20 minutes to complete the examination. The NTA grievance committee looked into this aspect and identified the 1,563 candidates from six centres in Meghalaya, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Surat and Chandigarh.

Advocate Kunal Cheema, appearing for the petition filed by 32 candidates, pointed to a 2015 decision by the top court which cancelled the All-India Pre-Medical Test following allegations of paper leak. Cheema requested the court that as investigations into alleged malpractices were underway, it would be appropriate to stay the counselling beginning July 6.

But the bench refused to accede to the demand. “Keep the arguments close to your heart. You can argue this on July 8. All these issues will be considered,” it said.

The top court first entertained a petition on NEET on May 17 before the summer vacations and issued notice to the Centre and NTA to file responses by July 8.

On June 11, another petition -- heard by the vacation bench -- got tagged with the earlier plea. Following this, NTA filed a petition seeking transfer of a petition against NEET from the Delhi high court to the top court, which too got listed for July 8. Along with it, six other petitions seeking cancellation of the examination and stay of results were also heard by the court, one of them demanding a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) into the incident.

NTA denied allegations of paper leak and issued a press release on June 7 explaining that out of the 67 candidates who secured full marks, 44 got on account of revision in one answer key of Physics while six -- all from the same exam centre in Haryana’s Bahadurgarh -- benefitted from grace marks.

“It is amply clear that the impact of the leak is all over and hence it is inevitable that a re-exam should be conducted, so that the petitioners get a fair opportunity to reap the correct results of their hard labour,” said Amulya Vijaya Pinapati, the lead petitioner among the 32 who filed their plea on Tuesday.