NEET UG 2024 Hearing Live Updates: The Supreme Court is hearing on a batch of pleas seeking cancellation, re-test and a court-monitored probe into the NEET UG 2024 exam held on May 5 this year.
Advocate Mathews J Nedumpara, appearing for petitioners, said in the SC on Monday that the paper leak leak industry is worth ₹2500 crores. “50,000 govt medical seats are there. Capitation fee is anything between ₹50 lakh to ₹1 crore. Leak has been happening for many many years, 2013, 2014, 2016," Nedumpara said.
Earlier, senior advocate Narender Hooda, appearing for petitioners-students, told the Supreme Court that if this Court was not considering re-NEET, at least qualified people should be asked to re-take the exam, which will be about 13 lakh people, legal news website LiveLaw reported. Earlier Hooda also informed the top court that since the paper leak took place through WhatsApp, it was impossible that it was confined only to Patna in Bihar.
In the previous hearing on July 18, the Apex Court bench of Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud and Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra heard directed the National Testing Authority (NTA) to the results of NEET UG 24 exam on their website – city-wise and centre-wise masking the identity of the candidates.
The NTA published the results on its website on Saturday, July 20, as directed by the Supreme Court.
NTA's Additional Affidavit
The NTA has filed an additional affidavit in the Supreme Court in the NEET UG 2024 case, according to legal news website LiveLaw. In the affidavit, the NTA has refuted petitioners’ allegation of conflict of interest on the part of IIT-M Director, who prepared the data analytics report.
The petitioners in the paper leak case have also filed an Intervention Application (IA) in the Supreme Court. The application has requested a retest for the nearly 3.5 lakh top scorers in the test. The petitioners said that they too have scored fairly high marks on the test — from 650 to 680 out of the total 720 marks.
What happened in last hearing?
In the July 18 hearing, the top court also flagged the NTA's “hypothesis" that the paper was “leaked", solved and memorised by students within just 45 minutes. The lawyer appearing for one of the petitioner alleged that there was increase in the syllabus for the exam and the changes were notified just few months before. He also said the transportation of the question papers was compromised in Hazaribag.
Earlier in the day, CJI DY Chandrachud told the petitioners that they needed to prove that the paper leak was ‘systemic’ and affected the entire examination so as to warrant the cancellation of the entire exam. The re-examination has to be on concrete footing that the sanctity of entire test was affected, the CJI said, according to a report on legal news website LiveLaw.
What is the government's version
The Union government has, in its affidavit, informed the Supreme Court that there was no evidence of widespread cheating or specific groups of candidates unfairly benefiting from abnormal scores in NEET UG 2024. The government also informed the Court that the Ministry of Education had requested IIT Madras to conduct comprehensive data analytics of the NEET-UG 2024 results.
NEET-UG 2024 was taken by 23.33 lakh students on May 5 across 4,750 centres in 571 cities, including 14 cities overseas. Conducted by the NTA, NEET UG is the entrance test for admissions to MBBS, BDS, AYUSH, and other related courses in government and private institutions nationwide.
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