The Supreme Court of India said the National Testing Agency had not learnt from the earlier NEET leak. It sought a reply from the Centre, NTA and the Central Bureau of Investigation on pleas seeking an autonomous body.
The Supreme Court observed that it was sad that the National Testing Agency (NTA) has not taken lessons from the earlier NEET question paper leak.
The court sought replies from the Centre, NTA and the CBI on pleas requesting the replacement of the testing agency with a more robust and autonomous body to conduct the medical entrance examination.
A bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe directed that copies of the petitions be served to Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, along with other parties.
The bench also asked NTA, which conducts the NEET exam, to file an affidavit by Thursday on compliance with directions issued by the court in 2024.
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The bench said,
“It’s sad that they have not learnt their lessons. The matter travelled to this court earlier also. There was a committee, a monitoring committee which made some recommendations and they were accepted. We want NTA to file an affidavit on the steps taken for compliance of recommendations suggested by the committee,”
The top court, while issuing notice on a plea filed by the Federation of All India Medical Association (FAIMA) through lawyer Tanvi Dubey, said it was clubbing all similar cases together.
The court also directed the Centre-appointed committee headed by former ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan to outline the steps taken to comply with the directions issued by the court and to reform NTA’s functioning.
The medical body urged the Supreme Court to either restructure NTA or replace it with a robust and autonomous system for conducting NEET-UG. It argued that recurring paper leaks amount to a direct assault on the fundamental rights of more than 22.7 lakh students.
It further requested the appointment of a high-powered monitoring committee until a new body is formally put in place to oversee the re-examination.
The plea suggested the committee be chaired by a retired Supreme Court judge, with a cybersecurity expert and a forensic scientist as members, to help ensure that further leaks do not occur.
The undergraduate-level NEET conducted on May 3 by NTA for admissions to medical education programmes was cancelled on May 12 following allegations of a paper leak, which are currently being investigated by the CBI.