Amid a raging row over alleged irregularities in the conduct of the medical entrance exam this year, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Thursday met some NEET aspirants at his residence in the national Capital.
According to sources, the students raised issues like the uncertainty prevailing over the fate of the exam which was conducted in May, the delay in the counselling process and ultimately the academic calendar. While there have been demand for a retest from several quarters, the Education Ministry has maintained the incidents of paper leak were localised, and by cancelling the exam it can jeopardise the careers of lakhs of candidates who cleared the test fairly. The matter has also reached the Supreme Court, which on Thursday adjourned till July 18 the hearing on the clutch of petitions seeking that exam be cancelled and the test be reconducted. The petitioners have also sought a probe into the alleged malpractices.
Besides, the CBI on Thursday arrested one of the alleged kingpins in the NEET-UG paper leak case who was on the run ever since the crackdown on irregularities in the entrance exam began, officials said. Rockey alias Rakesh Ranjan, who hails from Nalanda, and is said to be a relative of mastermind Sanjeev Mukhia, was nabbed by the agency from outskirts of Patna, they said.
The Ministry has informed the Supreme Court that a data analytics of the results of NEET-UG 2024 was conducted by IIT Madras which found there was neither any indication of “mass malpractice” nor a localised set of candidates benefiting from it and scoring abnormally high marks.
The Government’s assertion assumes significance in view of the observations made by the top court on July 8 that it may order a re-test if there were large-scale malpractices in holding the exam. The matter is being investigated by the CBI. Over 23.33 lakh students had taken the test on May 5 at 4,750 centres in 571 cities, including in 14 cities overseas.
The Centre and the NTA, in their earlier affidavits filed in the apex court, had said that scrapping the exam would be “counterproductive” and “seriously jeopardise” lakhs of honest candidates in the absence of any proof of large-scale breach of confidentiality. The National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test-Undergraduate (NEET-UG) is conducted by the NTA for admissions to MBBS, BDS, AYUSH and other related courses in Government and private institutions across the country.
The CBI had been trailing Rockey since the case came to the agency. His run came to an end on Thursday morning when he was arrested by the agency, they said. The agency produced him before a Special Court in Patna which has remanded him to 10 days of CBI custody, they said. Earlier this week, the CBI had conducted searches at 15 locations in Bihar and Jharkhand gathering incriminating evidence in the case, they said.
The agency had earlier arrested the principal and vice principal of Jharkhand’s Hazaribagh-based Oasis school in the case and two persons who allegedly lent premises to NEET candidates where burnt question papers were recovered by the Bihar Police.
The CBI, which is probing the alleged irregularities in the medical entrance exam, has registered six FIRs in the matter so far. The FIR from Bihar pertains to paper leaks, while the remaining, from Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, are linked to the impersonation of candidates and cheating.
