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New Delhi: A view of the Supreme Court (SC) of India, in New Delhi, Friday, July 12, 2024. SC on Friday granted interim bail to Kejriwal in a money laundering case linked to the alleged excise policy scam. (Photo: PTI)
The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the National Testing Agency (NTA) to declare the centre- and city-wise results of this year’s National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) after masking the identities of aspirants by Saturday noon.
The order to declare the results came as counsel for the petitioners complained of not being able to ascertain the centre-wise marking pattern since NTA had not published the results of all candidates.
“The petitioners have submitted that it would be appropriate if the results of the NEET-UG 2024 exam are published on the website so as to bring about some transparency on the centre-wise marks obtained by candidates,” the court said in its order.
On the issue of re-examination, the three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud asked the petitioners to show that the paper leak was ‘systemic’ and affected the entire examination, adding that any order for conducting the paper afresh has to be on concrete conclusion that the sanctity of the entire process was affected.
“The idea of somebody doing this is not to make a national charade of the NEET exam. People were doing it for money. Therefore, anybody who is making money out of it won’t circulate it on a mass scale,” the court said during the hearing.
The Centre and the NTA, in their earlier affidavits filed in the apex court, had said that scrapping the exam could be counterproductive and ‘seriously jeopardise’ lakhs of honest candidates in the absence of any proof of large-scale breach of confidentiality.
The Supreme Court also said that a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is on. “If what the agency has told us is revealed, it will affect the investigation; people will become wise,” it stated.
The top court will resume hearing the arguments on July 22 on a batch of pleas seeking cancellation, re-test, and a court-monitored probe into the allegations of large-scale malpractices in the prestigious test held on May 5.
The apex court’s directions come amid the controversy surrounding the pan-India medical entrance examination following allegations of malpractices, mass question paper leaks, and cheating.
The medical entrance examination conducted by the NTA was taken by around 2.3 million students at 4,750 centres across the country, including in 14 cities overseas.
First Published: Jul 18 2024 | 7:59 PM IST
