NEET-UG SC hearing begins: Top court asks, 'Show us the leak was so systemic to warrant exam's cancellation'

The Supreme Court of India has begun the hearing of a group of petitions surrounding the NEET-UG 2024 exam controversy today, July 18. According to the SC's cause list, the bench hearing the petitions today will be a three-judge bench comprising CJI D Y Chandrachud and justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra.

As proceedings began, CJI asked the attorney for the cancellation of the exam to prove if the leak was systemic. He said, "You have to show us that the leak was so systemic and affected the entire examination to warrant the cancellation of the entire exam."

The judges will be hearing over 40 petitions, including pleas filed by the National Testing Agency (NTA) and several students who appeared for the examination. The NTA seeks a transfer of all the cases against it pending in many High Courts regarding the NEET-UG controversy, PTI reported.

A re-examination and revocation of the outcome are also requested, taking into account the purported paper leak and other anomalies.

The hearing in the case was postponed by the Supreme Court on July 11 because several parties had not yet received the Center's and the NTA's reply.

In addition, the bench led by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud said during the hearing that it had obtained the Central Bureau of Investigation's (CBI) status report on the probe into the purported paper leak case, which would be reviewed on the following date.

It should be noted that the Center, citing important conclusions from the IIT-Madras data research, submitted a brief to the Supreme Court last week defending the validity of the NEET-UG 2024 exam procedure. According to the Center, there was no evidence of widespread wrongdoing or any particular group of candidates who benefited unfairly from the IIT Madras study. It further said that all centres had a similar distribution of high ratings.

In a second affidavit, the NTA stated that it had analysed the mark distribution and found no evidence of extraneous factors that may have affected it, indicating that the distribution of markings is relatively typical.

The top court had ordered the NTA on July 8 to do a full disclosure on three factors: the timing of the initial paper leak, the method of question paper distribution, and the interval between the leak's occurrence and the exam's real administration.

According to CJI DY Chandrachud, it is undeniable that the exam's integrity has been compromised and that the paper leak is a fact. The Chief Justice stated that we are thinking about the implications of it.