Delhi High Court dismisses plea to quash the result of NEET UG 2019

The Delhi High Court has dismissed a batch of petitions to quash the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) UG, 2019 result which was declared on June 5, 2019..The Judgement was passed by a Single Judge Bench of Justice Anu Malhotra..The petitioners had approached the High Court after discovering that the National Testing Agency (NTA) had not identified and marked the “correct options” of answers in the answer key issued by them for NEET-UG 2019. It was contended that three questions had two correct options which was against the information memorandum issued by the NTA as there could be just one right answer to a question..As a result, fearing negative marking, the petitioners did not attempt these questions..The petitions had, therefore, also sought a direction to the NTA to declare a revised and corrected list of the petitioner-candidates by giving them full marks in relation to the disputed the questions..NTA responded by arguing that the petitions were wholly misconceived as no fundamental or legal rights of the petitioners had been violated. It was also stated that as per the scheme of NEET UG, 2019 Examination, the special experts appointed by the NTA had duly considered the objections to the answer key. The same was, however, rejected on finding no merits..After hearing the parties, the Court opined that it was not open to the Court to take upon itself to ascertain the correctness of the answer key as in view of the factum that there had been an expert evaluation of the answers and the answer key..The Court also said that if the petitioners were sure of correctness of their answers, they should have marked any of the two correct answers as being the answer to the disputed question. The Court observed that marks have been granted to the candidates who had opted of either of the correct answers mentioned in the final revised answer key..The Court thus concluded that the petitioners had not in any manner suffered by two correct answers for the disputed questions and dismissed the petitions..The petitioners were represented by Senior Advocate Arvind Nayar and Advocates Vikas Kumar, Manish Paliwal, Malika, Ashutosh, Shaurya Sahay, Avijit Mani Tripathi, Mananjay Mishra, Sidharth Jha, and Prabhakar Thakur..NTA was represented by Advocates Amit Bansal, Seema Dolo, Bhagwan Swaroop Shukla, and Sarvan Kumar Shukla..Read the Judgement: