HC seeks Centre, NAT's response on plea challenging NEET 2019

New Delhi, June 17 (IANS) The Delhi High Court on Monday asked the Centre and the National Testing Agency (NTA) to file their response on a plea challenging the 2019 National Eligibility-cum Entrance Test (NEET) for admissions to MBBS and BDS courses.

Justice Jayant Nath also asked the Medical Council of India, the Dental Council of India and the Directorate General of Health Services to file their reply on the plea and listed the matter for hearing on July 4.

The court was hearing various petitions filed by students challenging the NEET 2019.

One of the petitions was filed by six students, who took coaching from the Career Toppers in Kolkata. 

Saurrish Ghosh, founder-director at Career Toppers, told the court that the NAT didn't identify and mark the correct options in the answer key issued by it for NEET 2019.

"Further, three questions had two correct options which was against the information memorandum issued by the NTA wherein it was mentioned that a single option will be correct out of four," read the plea filed by law firm Corporate Legal Partners.

The petitioners had marked the correct options in the answer sheets which didn't correspond to the answer key issued by the NAT.

"Meaning thereby, if the stand of the petitioner that the answer key has wrong reflections for right options or more than one correct option, the entire process of selection and fixing the merit becomes unfair and leads to serious violation of legal as well as fundamental rights of the petitioner," the plea said. 

The students said that they seriously felt that if the results were declared as per the correct answers and provisions (as per the answer key issued by the NAT), their ranks in the list would have improved substantially.

Therefore, the students requested the court to issue directions to quash the results of the 2019 NEET.

They also requested the court to direct the NAT to declare the revised and corrected results as per the correct answers marked by them.

The petitioners further sought directions to the NAT to give them full marks in the erroneous questions.