NEET 2024: Plea in Supreme Court claims NTA officials manipulated OMR sheets

A plea in the Supreme Court has alleged that the National Testing Agency (NTA) was involved in the manipulation of Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets for this year's National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET)..A Bench of Justices Manoj Misra and SVN Bhatti questioned the plea's qualification as a writ petition under Article 32 of the Constitution and asked the petitioner to intervene in the existing proceedings before the Court."How [is this] an Article 32 plea? You can withdraw High Court plea and intervene here," the Court said..The plea has alleged that NTA officials were involved in the swapping of OMR sheets. It has sought investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) into the malpractices that marred the conduct of the NEET undergraduate exam..The matter will be heard on July 8 along with a slew of pleas, including one filed by the NTA to transfer cases pertaining to NEET pending before various High Courts to the Supreme Court..On June 20, the Court had issued notice on the transfer plea and stayed proceedings related to NEET before various High Courts. The matter was then tagged with related pleas..On June 11, the Supreme Court had ordered the NTA to respond to the plea leveling allegations that the NEET UG paper was leaked. Then too, the top court had said that it will not stop counseling for admission of students to medical colleges.Media reports also state that an extraordinarily large number of candidates got a perfect score as per the results published on June 4.The candidates have alleged irregularities in the award of compensatory marks to students for loss of time.Notably, on May 17, a three-judge bench of Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice Manoj Misra had declined to stay the publication of the results of the exam.