SC Adjourns Hearing In NEET-UG Case To July 18, Petitioners Get Time To Reply To Centre’s Affidavit

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday enabled petitioners to file their responses to the affidavits submitted by the Centre and the National Testing Agency (NTA), while hearing the pleas to cancel the NEET-UG 2024 examination. The apex court, thus, adjourned the hearing in these matters until July 18 (Thursday).

According to a LiveLaw report, the bench led by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud had initially proposed to list the matters on July 15. But, Solicitor General of India Tushar Mehta cited a personal difficulty, stating that both he and the Attorney General would not be present on Monday and Tuesday.

Considering that next Wednesday is a Muharram holiday, the court deferred the next hearing to Thursday. The matter was being heard by a bench comprising CJI DY Chandrachud, Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra. A batch of petitions sought the cancellation of the NEET-UG 2024 exam held on May 5 on account of alleged paper leak and irregularities.

In an interview to the ANI, the advocate for petitioner, Neetu Verma, said: “Today’s hearing has been adjourned for next Thursday. They demanded some investigation report from the CBI…But no investigation report has been submitted by the CBI yet.”

On Wednesday (July 10), the Centre had filed an affidavit rubbishing claims of mass malpractice in the exam. The affidavit stated that the data analytics done by the Indian Institute of Technology Madras showed that mark distribution followed a bell-shaped curve that is seen in any large-scale exam, indicating no abnormalities, claimed the LiveLaw report.

In a separate affidavit, the NTA claimed that the video showing a photo of the NEET UG exam paper leaked on Telegram on May 4 was fake. “The timestamp was manipulated to create a false impression of an early leak,” the NTA affidavit stated.

Earlier, on July 8 the bench led by CJI had sought responses from the Centre and NTA on the extent of the paper leak and if it was possible to segregate the wrongdoers from others. The court had observed that if the sanctity of the entire exam was affected and it was impossible to separate the fraud beneficiaries from the ‘honest candidates’, then it may be required to conduct a re-test.