SC tells NTA to hand original OMRs to NEET aspirants who alleged discrepancies, claims lawyer

The Supreme Court of India, on Thursday, heard a plea by a few students and their parents who had alleged discrepancies and manipulation in their NEET OMR sheets, as per the claims of the opposing counsel. Advocate Tanvi Dubey, who appeared for the petitioners said that the top court had asked the National Testing Agency, which conducts NEET, to consider producing the original OMR sheets of these students if a representation is made. The order is yet to be uploaded.

The NTA had released the OMR sheets of the students who wrote NEET, on their website, in the first week of October. Since then, a lot of students and parents had come forward alleging discrepancies in their OMR sheets. A lot of them who spoke to EdexLive then had said that they had noticed a difference of more than 200 marks than what they had expected. A parent had even spent Rs 91,000, challenging 91 of his daughter's answers. At the same time, some of them had alleged that the marks on their NEET scorecards were different from what they had calculated during the OMR challenge.

The plea was signed by 19 petitioners and the arguments were led by Sidhartha Luthra and Gopal Shankarnarayan. Apart from seeking the NTA to produce the original OMR sheets, the other prayers included asking the NTA "to constitute a high-power committee to examine the complaints regarding the tampering of the OMR sheets of the Petitioners, so as to ensure transparency in the basis of the evaluation process." It also asked the court to quash the NEET 2020 results and "to issue a direction to the effect that NEET 2020 is erroneous, faulty, defective and violative of Article 14 and 15 of the Constitution of India." The plea was heard by a bench consisting of Justices L Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta and Ajay Rastogi. The petition was filed on October 16.