Guwahati: In a major reprieve for the tribal students of the state of Meghalaya, who were previously denied NEET-UG retest, the Supreme Court on Friday issued notice on a plea seeking directions to the National Testing Agency (NTA) to allow them to appear in the retest.
Ten aspirants of NEET-UG from Meghalaya had moved to the Supreme Court demanding a retest amidst allegations of discrepancies during the recently concluded examinations.
These students have sought inclusion in the group of 1,563 candidates who were granted grace marks and offered the opportunity to reappear for the retest on June 23.
These students had allegedly lost 45 minutes when they appeared for the NEET-UG test.
The Supreme Court vacation bench of Justices Vikram Nath and S V N Bhatti in an order stated, “Issue notice. Tag (with the pending batch of petitions). In the meantime, learned counsel appearing for respondents NTA and Union of India may file their response within two weeks. The other respondents may also file their response on or before the next date fixed.”
The Apex Court has scheduled the hearing of the Meghalaya students’ petition for July 8.
According to Yoothica Pallavi, the lawyer who appeared on behalf of the ten Meghalaya students, she submitted the writ petition before the Supreme Court which that they were similarly placed as 1,563 students who were allowed to take retest on June 23.
Palavi mentioned that the ten students appeared at test centres in Meghalaya and lost 40-45 minutes of time.
She also argued that the petitioners have not been included in the proposed retest even though they have suffered on account act and omission on the part of NTA.
“It is submitted that the petitioners were denied allocated time of 3 hours and 20 minutes in as much as a lot of time was wasted due to supply of wrong question papers and contradictory instructions given to the students by the examiners,” Pallavi retorted.