After hearing a plea filed by Ayushi Patel from Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow, the Allahabad High Court has dismissed a petition. Patel had filed a petition alleging that her OMR answer sheet was torn which led to the delayed release of her result by the National testing Agency (NTA).
The court had earlier issued an order asking NTA to present Patel’s original OMR sheet. However, when the document was presented in court, it showed no sign of damage whatsoever.
The court, therefore, termed it a case of forged documents and allowed NTA to take any legal action against Patel.
In its ruling, the court said, “The petitioner has submitted forged documents, and in such a situation this court cannot stop NTA from taking legal action against the student.”
The NTA later affirmed its intentions to file a legal action against Ayushi Patel on her false petition. Although upon a request by Aushi’s lawyer to withdraw the petition, the court accepted the withdrawal.
After the release of the NEET-UG result 2024 on June 4, Patel circulated a video that got viral on social media alleging that the NTA failed to declare her result because of a torn OMR sheet. She claimed that she had received an email from an NTA website which had also shared her torn OMR sheet.
She also claimed upon evaluating the marks of the torn OMR, she was scoring a 715, according to the answer key released by NEET.
Patel asked for an investigation of the NTA, a manual review of her OMR sheet, and an end to the continued admission counselling in her appeal.
However, the NTA found later that her result had been declared under the wrong application number. The actual result displayed under the incorrect application number revealed a significantly lower score of 335 marks, contradicting her calculated performance.
Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra retweeted Ayushi Patel's viral video, endorsing her allegations of irregularities in her test results. Gandhi had also called on the government to act against purported anomalies and document leaks, as well as to "give up its careless attitude."
After Ayushi Patel's appeal was denied by the High Court, BJP spokesman Shehzad Poonawala attacked the Congress MP, accusing her of "peddling fakery" and "amplifying lies." In addition to requesting action against Gandhi, he called on her to apologise.