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Supreme Court to hear plea seeking postponement of NEET PG tomorrow
The Supreme Court on Friday will hear pleas seeking the postponement of the NEET PG 2024 examination, scheduled for Sunday.
The Supreme Court of Friday is scheduled to hear a plea seeking the postponement of the NEET PG examination, which is set to take place on August 11. According to the plea, students want the medical entrance exam to be postponed by a few days as they have been allocated cities that are highly inconvenient for them to reach.
A bench comprising Chief Justice of India (CJI) D Y Chandrachud and Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra on Thursday took note of the submissions of lawyer Anas Tanwir on the issue. The bench said the matter will be listed on Friday.
The plea said the students were allotted cities that are highly inconvenient for them to reach. It said the cities were allotted to the students on July 31, while the specific centres were scheduled to be allotted on August 8.
While the allocation of the centres was done to curb malpractices, the plea said it is difficult for the candidates to make arrangements for travel to specific cities due to the paucity of time.
"Issue a writ in the nature of Mandamus ...the Respondents (National Testing Agency) to reschedule the NEET-PG 2024 examination," stated the plea filed by Vishal Soren.
The petitioners submitted that more than two lakh students are scheduled to appear in the examination.
The examination is scheduled to be held in 185 test cities, therefore resulting in the non-availability of train tickets as well as the hiking of airfares due to dynamic pricing, thereby making it almost impossible for a large number of students to reach their test centres, the petition said.
NEET UG 2024 row
As per the initial schedule, the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) PG 2024 was supposed to be conducted on July 23. However, it was postponed by the Union Health Ministry as a “precautionary measure” after alleged irregularities in the NEET UG examination held months ago.
The irregularities and malpractices in competitive examinations sparked a major uproar shortly after the results of the NEET-UG 2024 examination were announced on June 4, with 67 students scoring a perfect 720/720 in the medical entrance exam.
Many students staged protests against the inflated marking by NTA and the large concentration of toppers from specific centres. After multiple petitions were heard by the Supreme Court regarding the matter, a retest of the NEET UG exam was conducted, which brought down the number of toppers to 17.
(With inputs from ANI, PTI)
