New Delhi: The Supreme Court has shut the door on NEET postponement. A judicial bench including Justices Ashok Bhushan, MR Shah, and R Subhash Reddy declined three last-minute petitions pleading to defer the NEET exam date. The exam is scheduled to take place on September 13th.
The medical entrance exam, the judges said, will happen as scheduled. Justice Bhushan said, “Everything is over now. The review has also been dismissed. JEE is also over. How can we consider the petition now?”.
Justice Shah added that it would be unfair to postpone the exam now. He said that all the preparations have been completed and everything is set for the exam of 13th.
In reply, the advocates who represented the students pleaded that many students can’t come out of containment zones due to the sudden increase in COVID cases. They pointed out that in states such as Bihar that have only a couple of examination centres would prove impossible to attend with no functional trains.
The last pleas for NEET postponement
The three petitions were filed by groups of candidates, in cases listed as Keshav Maheshwari, Arijit Sahu and Pragya Pranjal, each against the National Testing Agency, according to legal news site LiveLaw, which reported the hearing of 9 September, four days before the examination. The students stressed that they wanted NEET postponement, not cancellation. Justice Bhushan opened with the question of maintainability, asking how the court could entertain fresh petitions after the main case and the review that followed it had both been dismissed.
Senior Advocate Arvind P. Datar told the bench that 16 lakh students were writing the only entrance examination for medical courses, and pointed to Bihar, which had just two centres, in Patna and Gaya, with trains not running until the 30th. “We are only asking for 3 weeks postponement,” he said.
Senior Advocate KTS Tulsi raised the position of students inside containment zones, and cited a Bombay High Court order the previous week asking the testing agency to consider the cases of students who could not write the JEE. Datar’s fallback plea was narrower still: one more chance for candidates who might find it difficult to take the paper because of pandemic restrictions. The bench refused the NEET postponement, but that smaller idea would resurface within weeks. None of the three petitions questioned the examination itself; the quarrel was timing.
They also pleaded to allow to sit for the NEET exam a second time. The Supreme Court already dismissed a petition to defer the NEET and JEE exams before the plea. Besides, another petition filed pleading to review their dismissal was also dismissed. Consequently, the JEE examination took place between September 1st to 6th.
Supreme Court: NEET exam timing had been settled weeks earlier
The bench’s impatience had a history behind it. On 17 August 2020, a bench of Justices Arun Mishra, BR Gavai and Krishna Murari had dismissed Sayantan Biswas v NTA, the main petition against holding NEET and JEE in September, observing that “the career of the students cannot be put on peril for long and full academic year cannot be wasted”, LiveLaw reported. A review petition against that order, filed by ministers from six states, was dismissed on 5 September.
The sequence mattered. The August order had refused postponement outright, and the review had failed, so the petitioners were asking the court to reopen a settled question days before the examination. Justice Bhushan’s remark that “JEE is also over” pointed to the other half of the argument: the JEE Main had already been held in the first week of September at centres across the country, and any NEET postponement at that stage would have unpicked a calendar the court had twice refused to disturb.
The August order had already answered the pandemic argument in general terms. “In our opinion, though there is pandemic situation, but ultimately life has to go and the career of the students cannot be put on peril for long,” the Mishra bench wrote, according to LiveLaw, finding “absolutely no justification” for postponing either NEET UG or JEE Main. The fresh petitions tried to narrow the question to logistics: centres, trains and containment zones. Four days before the paper, the bench declined to reopen it on those terms.
Since then: the exam went ahead
NEET was held as scheduled on 13 September 2020. Candidates who missed it because they were Covid-positive or living in containment zones were given a second chance in a separate sitting on 14 October, which only around 200 candidates took, Careers360 reported. That second sitting resembled the one-more-chance arrangement the lawyers had pressed for at the September hearing, arriving a month after the court declined to order it.
The National Testing Agency declared the results on 16 October 2020, after delays and glitches on the results website. Of the 13,66,945 candidates who appeared, 7,71,500 qualified, according to the same report, a pass rate of about 56 per cent; registrations had risen by 5.14 per cent on the previous year while the number of qualifiers fell by 3.20 per cent, which the report attributed to the fall in candidates actually appearing during the pandemic. Two candidates finished with a perfect 720 out of 720: Soyeb Aftab of Odisha topped the list, with Akanksha Singh of Delhi ranked second.
The October sitting left its own loose end: a parents’ association complained that phase-two candidates could not see their OMR sheets or answer key in the way the September candidates had. But the larger picture held. The petitions of September changed nothing about the date, and the result the court protected became the gateway to the year’s medical admissions.
The All India Rank was used for both tiers of counselling: the Directorate General of Health Services ran the 15 per cent All India Quota in government colleges along with seats in deemed and central universities, ESIC institutions and AFMC Pune, while state counselling authorities used the same ranks to draw up merit lists for the remaining 85 per cent of government seats and for state private colleges, Careers360 reported.
