New Delhi. The Supreme Court on Monday said it is sad that the National Testing Agency (NTA) has not learned a lesson from the earlier NEET paper leaks. The court sought responses from the Centre, NTA and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on pleas seeking to replace the examination agency with a strong and autonomous body to conduct the medical entrance examination.
Justice P.S. A bench of Justices Narasimha and Alok Aradhe directed that copies of the petitions be served to Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, besides other parties. The court asked the NTA, responsible for conducting the NEET exam, to file an affidavit by Thursday on compliance with the guidelines issued by the court in 2024.
“It is sad that he has not learned his lesson,” the bench said. This matter had come before this court also. A committee, a monitoring committee, was formed which made some recommendations and they were accepted. We want NTA to file an affidavit on the steps taken to comply with the recommendations suggested by the committee.
Issuing notice on the petition filed by Federation of All India Medical Associations (FAIMA) through advocate Tanvi Dubey, the top court said it is clubbing together all the cases related to the subject. The court appointed former chief of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) K. Radhakrishnan-led committee was directed to give a detailed account of the steps taken to improve the functioning of NTA and comply with its directions.
The top court directed all the parties to file their replies within three days and scheduled the next hearing of the case on Friday. FAIMA, citing the repeated paper leaks as a “direct attack on the fundamental rights” of over 22 lakh students, sought the apex court’s direct intervention and sought restructuring of the NTA or establishment of a strong and autonomous system for conducting the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Graduation (NEET-UG) in its place.
The petition seeks a direction that a high-level monitoring committee be appointed until a new committee is formally constituted to oversee the re-examination. The petition said that the committee should include a retired Supreme Court judge as chairman, cyber security experts and forensic scientists, so that no further data is leaked.
The NEET-UG exam, conducted on May 3 by the NTA for admission to medical education courses, was canceled on May 12 amid allegations of paper leak, which is now being investigated by the CBI. After the cancellation of the examination, several petitions have been filed in the Supreme Court.
FAIMA’s petition said that the Special Operation Group (SOG) of Rajasthan Police has discovered that 120 questions of Biology and Chemistry of NEET-UG conducted for the year 2026 matched the questions included in the ‘predicted question papers’ circulated on WhatsApp and Telegram. The plea alleged that despite NTA’s claims of adopting high-tech security measures, including 5G jammers, GPS tracking and AI-controlled cameras, these measures existed ‘only on paper’.
The petition sought a direction to the CBI to submit a report before the Supreme Court within four weeks regarding the investigation in the paper leak case, containing details of the networks identified, arrests made in this regard, accused persons and the progress of prosecution. The petition said that in order to ‘transparently detect irregularities’, NTA should be asked to immediately publish the centre-wise results of ‘NEET-UG’ held for 2026.
Comments are closed.