NEET UG row: Supreme Court adjourns hearing till July 18

NEET UG row: The Supreme Court on Thursday adjourned the hearing of the case relating to the NEET-UG 2024 exam till next Thursday. The matter will be heard on July 18.

A bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud adjourned the hearing after petitioners' lawyers requested additional time to review the responses filed by the Centre and the National Testing Agency (NTA), which administers the exam. It further stated that the CBI had filed its report on the status of the investigation in accordance with prior directions. 

Earlier, the Centre maintained in its affidavit that there was no indication  of "mass malpractice" or a specific set of students benefiting from NEET-UG 2024, citing a data analytics report given by the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras. In a second affidavit, the NTA stated that the total number of actual candidates with final scores of perfect 720 marks was just 61. The agency dismissed petitioners' claims that 67 candidates had flawless scores as "fallacious and incorrect".

The NTA also doubled down on its "no leak" stance, telling the Supreme Court that no question paper was found to be missing and that no locks were broken in Patna.

"No question paper was found missing in any Trunk. Each question paper has a unique serial number and was assigned to a particular candidate. No locks were found broken. The reports from NTA Observers did not report anything adverse. The CCTV coverage in the Command Centre was constantly monitored. No untoward incident or any pointer to paper leakage was observed," it stated.

The NTA also stated that viral videos claiming to show images of a leaked NEET-UG question paper on the social media platform Telegram were fake.  “Discussions within the Telegram channel indicate that members identified the video as fake. The timestamp was manipulated to create a false impression of an early leak. Comments and discussions on social media further corroborate that the images in the video were edited, and the date was intentionally modified to suggest a May 4 leak. The screenshots highlight the fabricated nature of the claims made in the video”, according to NTA affidavit.