The Punjab and Haryana high court has declined to order an investigation into allegations by a student of “discrepancy” in her National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) result. The exam is conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA) for admission for MBBS/ BDS into medical colleges across the country.
The petition by 19-year-old from Gurdaspur, complained that two different score cards had been released by NTA in her case. One score card showed 85 marks out of 720, whereas the second, released earlier, had 520 marks.
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Court upholds NTA's record
The NTA had produced the “original record” and maintained that the OMR sheet produced by the student are “forged documents”. “..they do not exist nor form part of the official record of the NTA.
The scorecard has been changed / manipulated with 520 marks as well as the percentile,” the agency had claimed adding that only one OMR sheet of NEET-UG was uploaded on the portal on July 13 in respect of all the candidates including the petitioner and that there is no change in OMR sheet since then.
The court observed that it has examined the “original record” and is “satisfied” that OMR sheet produced by the student is xerox copy of the “original OMR sheet” produced by the NTA. “Once the original record has been produced before this court by NTA, extraordinary jurisdiction under Article 226 cannot be exercised merely on the basis of a xerox/downloaded copy of a document, whose contents are inconsistent with original record maintained by the examining body” the court observed while dismissing the plea.