Madurai: Two cases filed against the 'Neet' examination before the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court (vacation sitting) has been transferred to principal seat in Chennai.
Justice M V Muralidharan passed an interim order staying the publication of the National-Eligibility-Cum-Entrance Test (Neet) results for the admission to MBBS/BDS courses for the academic year 2017-18 based on these two writ petitions.
G Illangovan, registrar (Judicial), Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court, in an official communication to the registrar (Judicial), Chennai, stated that the entire case bundles in W.P (MD) Nos 9289 & 9606 of 2017 on the file of this court were transmitted to the principal seat for being listed along with W.P Nos. 12701 & 13031 of 2017. All these writ petitions would be taken up for hearing in the principal bench.
As many as nine students who appeared for the Neet examination conducted by CBSE on May 7, and T Sakthimalarkodi, the father of another girl student from Tiruchy, had filed the writ petitions during vacation sitting in the Madurai Bench. They contended that different question papers were given to candidates who took the same eligibility test. The court had stayed the publication of Neet result till June 12.
The CBSE in its counter clarified that only two set of questions papers of similar difficulty level were administered for Neet exam. It used one set for English and Hindi (for 90.75 per cent candidates), and another set for remaining eight vernacular languages such as Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, Bengali, Assamese, Telugu, Tamil and Kannada (for 09.25 per cent candidates) in order to prevent the leakage of question papers.
However, in the counter filed by Tamil Nadu government it had requested the court to permit them to continue with its present policy of admitting students based on Plus-2 marks in view of the confusion prevailing among the students over the conduct of the exam.
Dr J Radhakrishnan, principal secretary to Tamil Nadu Government, Health and Family Welfare, also pointed out that the State government has been continuing to press the Government of India to permit it to exempted by obtaining President's assent to the two pending state bills including the Tamil Nadu Admission to MBBS and BDS course bill 2017.
