Chennai: The Madras High Court has directed the Central Government to submit CCTV footage from a NEET exam centre to verify whether aspirants attending the exam there were affected due to a power outage following heavy rains on the day of the exam.
The undergraduate NEET examination was conducted nationwide on May 5. In Chennai, incessant downpour led to power disruptions in some places. Later, 13 students who wrote the exam at Kendriya Vidyalaya in Avadi, including two students from the Government Higher Secondary School in Kundrathur, and one student from Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan in KK Nagar, filed petitions before the High Court, claiming that they were unable to write the exam properly due to the power outage.
In the petitions, the students sought cancellation of the May 5 exam and requested a re-examination. In response, the High Court had issued an interim order restraining the announcement of NEET results.
However, the National Testing Agency (NTA) informed the court that no significant disruptions occurred due to the power outage and most students at the concerned centres had managed to answer a substantial number of questions. Therefore, a re-exam was deemed unnecessary.
Considering the submissions, the High Court dismissed the petitions, noting that over 2.2 million students had appeared for NEET across the country and ordering a re-exam would have widespread consequences.
Following this, the students challenged this decision and filed an appeal, which came up for hearing before a division bench comprising Justices J Nisha Banu and M Jothiraman.
Senior counsel appearing for the students argued that the candidates did face trouble during the exam and that they were unable to complete the paper due to the unexpected power outage.
In response, the counsel for the Central Government countered that approximately 464 students had appeared for NEET at the concerned exam centre, of which only 13 had approached the court.
After hearing argument from both the sides, the judges ruled that they could not interfere with the earlier single-judge order. However, they have directed that the CCTV footage from the exam centre be submitted before the court by next Monday (June 16).
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