In the first penal action against NEET-UG retest candidates who moved court over their marks based on alleged tampered Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) answer sheets, the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court has imposed a penalty of Rs 5,000 each on four students. The fine is to be paid to the National Testing Agency (NTA), which conducted the re-examination on June 21.
A small section of the nearly 20 lakh students who appeared for the retest felt they deserved higher marks than those awarded in the results declared on July 16. Some submitted copies of their OMR sheets to support their claims, but a majority of these were later found to be fake.
The division bench of Justice NB Suryawanshi and Justice AD Shinde heard the petitions, which alleged that the re-NEET results declared by the NTA were incorrect and that errors had occurred during the evaluation of answer sheets. The claims were based on tampered and AI-generated OMR sheets.
According to sources in the Education Ministry, the four candidates who filed the writ petitions were Atharva, Hricha, Soham and Rahul.
Taking note of the seriousness of the allegations, the High Court directed that the original answer sheets of the concerned students be brought from Delhi in sealed envelopes for verification. The answer sheets were produced before the bench and examined by the judges. The students, their parents and their lawyers were also allowed to inspect the original answer sheets.
After examining the original answer sheets and records, the court found that the marks awarded and the results declared by the NTA matched and that there were no errors in evaluation or marking. The bench found no discrepancies in the answer sheets evaluated by the NTA.
“Two of the petitions have been dismissed by the court after examining their original OMR sheets and the ones they submitted, while two petitioners withdrew their petitions on their own,” a source said.
“The Court imposed a fine of Rs. 5,000 on each of the four petitioners to be paid to NTA,” another source said.
Before approaching the court, the candidates had raised the issue with the NTA through the OMR challenge process available to all candidates on the examination portal. The NTA had responded to them during that period.
The NTA had repeatedly cautioned students against making false claims by submitting tampered or AI-generated OMR sheets between July 18 and July 20. The agency had stated, "In the wake of many OMR sheets submitted for scrutiny turning out to be fake/AI generated, students and parents are advised to submit only original OMRs for scrutiny. Any fake / AI generated OMR may invite legal action against the complainant."
Rohit Sarvagya, Senior Panel Counsel for the NTA, represented the Central Government and the testing agency during the proceedings and presented the original documents and records before the court for examination.
