The National Testing Agency (NTA) has submitted a fresh affidavit to the Supreme Court refuting allegations of a conflict of interest against the IIT-Madras director. The director’s report has been heavily relied upon by the NTA and the Union government to deny claims of a widespread leak and systemic failure in the conduct of NEET-UG 2024.
The NTA’s affidavit filed on Sunday night clarified that the director of IIT-Madras, which holds the responsibility of conducting JEE (Advanced) in 2024, is an ex-officio member of the NTA governing body. However, it emphasised that the core functions of NTA are executed by its managing committee, while the governing body only handles policy matters.
Furthermore, the affidavit stated that the IIT-Madras director had nominated another professor to attend the governing body meetings, with the nominee participating in the last meeting in December 2023. The director himself has not attended any NTA general body meeting since December 2022, it added.
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During a hearing on July 18, petitioners demanding a re-test raised the issue of a conflict of interest, arguing that the IIT-Madras director should not have prepared the report due to his position on the NTA governing body. Solicitor general (SG) Tushar Mehta countered this argument, asserting that the director’s role as an ex-officio member was solely for the purpose of conducting the JEE-Advanced exam. He also noted that the director had delegated another professor to attend NTA meetings.
The court will take up the matter today.
While hearing the case on July 18, the Supreme Court had directed NTA to publish the marks obtained by all students in NEET-UG 2024 by 12 pm on Saturday. This publication was to include the city and centre where the students appeared for the exam, with the candidates’ identities masked. The court stressed that this move was in the interest of transparency, particularly in light of students’ grievances about their inability to argue their case without centre-wise and city-wise marks. This data, the court suggested, could potentially reveal patterns indicating whether some centres or regions had an inordinate number of successful candidates. NTA complied with this directive and released the data on Saturday.
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The court had on that day decided to limit its scrutiny of the validity of NEET-UG 2024 to two specific instances of paper leaks in Patna and Hazaribagh. The court underscored that its decision on whether to scrap the examination and order a retest would depend on whether the breaches were localized or systemic. This stance was articulated by a bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, who emphasised that the petitioners demanding a retest needed to provide concrete evidence of widespread leaks that compromised the entire exam’s integrity.
“The fact that there was a leak at Patna and Hazaribagh is admitted. The question papers had been disseminated there. We want to ensure whether this was confined to those centres or widespread,” stated the bench, which also included justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra.
The court scheduled the next hearing for July 22 and requested the investigation report from the Bihar Police, which initially handled the probe before it was transferred to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on June 22.
The NEET-UG 2024 examination saw 2.4 million students appearing at 4,750 centres across 571 cities worldwide. However, the weeks following the exam were marred by widespread protests across India, with thousands of students demonstrating against allegations of question paper leaks, inflated marking, and arbitrary allowance of grace marks. Opposition parties have also called for a Supreme Court-monitored probe into the allegations. Despite the outcry, the government has consistently ruled out a retest, maintaining that the leaks were localized and arguing that cancelling the exam would be unfair to the successful candidates.
