The Supreme Court on Friday asked the National Testing Agency why Union Public Service Commission exams witnessed no question paper leaks and directed the government to fix responsibility for the leaks on specific individuals.
“In UPSC exams, there has never been such a situation. You need to learn from it,” the bench of Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Alok S. Aradhe observed
orally.
This year’s NEET-UG, the national entrance test for undergraduate medical and dental courses, had to be cancelled following a massive paper leak — an affliction suffered all too often by exams conducted by the NTA, the country’s apex testing agency. A fresh examination will be held on June 21.
“What has happened has been traumatic for the students, parents and families who had spent years preparing for the test. We should not disappoint our youngsters,” Justice Narasimha told solicitor-general Tushar Mehta and others during the day’s hearing.
“The real problem will not stop till accountability arises. Not in terms of ‘So-and-so will be liable’. It will be effective when we know on which individual shoulders the responsibility lies. Unless you identify the duty holders, it will be a diffused
obligation.”
The bench is hearing two public-interest pleas that want the NTA replaced by another authority and a CBI probe into the repeated NEET-UG question leaks (the agency is already investigating the matter).
It has received two affidavits on what action the NTA has taken on a court-ordered monitoring committee’s recommendations on preventing question leaks. The affidavits were filed separately by the NTA and K. Radhakrishnan, head of the monitoring committee, which was formed in November 2024.
The bench observed that if the NEET-UG leaks happened despite the high-powered committee’s recommendations, there was either something seriously wrong with the recommendations “or, there is no proper implementation”.
It asked Radhakrishnan whether the recommendations had had any positive impact and, if so, why the latest leak happened.
Radhakrishnan said 95 recommendations had been made, involving 60 short-term and 35 long-term measures, and some of them had already been implemented. He underscored that last year’s NEET-UG had faced no major hitches.
Following the recent leaks, the committee has suggested some additional measures for smooth conduct of the June 21 exam, he added.
Mehta said the government, too, had evolved certain new security measures. he pleaded that it would not be proper to publicise them.
“The Hon’ble Prime Minister is personally supervising it,” Mehta told the court.
Justice Narasimha suggested the NTA seek collaboration with, and inputs from, various universities to deal with the problem. The next hearing will be held in the second week of July.
At the last hearing on Monday, the bench had said: “It is so sad that they (NTA) haven’t learned their lesson.”
The NTA — which holds key all-India entrance tests for medical (NEET), engineering (JEE Main) and general (CUET) courses — has been plagued with paper leaks since its inception in 2018.
The UPSC conducts all-India recruitment tests for a range of government services including the civil, defence, medical, forest and central armed police services.
One of the petitions is a “letter petition”, sent to the Chief Justice of India jointly by Dr Dhruv Chauhan, national spokesperson for the Indian Medical Association Junior Doctors Network, and Harisharan Devgan, social activist. The other has been filed by the Federation of All India Medical Associations.