The Supreme Court on Monday favoured cancelling the 2017 SSC examination, whose declaration of results it had stayed in August, and holding it afresh by the National Testing Agency (NTA) or the CBSE “in the interest of students”.
The top court observed it was difficult to ascertain the real beneficiaries of the irregularities in the “tainted” examination and hence it should be scrapped.
It refused to agree with the contention of Centre that the examination held in February this year got “tainted” due to a technical snag and a fresh examination of one paper had been conducted thereafter.
The examination papers of the SSC CGL were allegedly leaked, leading to huge protests from job seekers for several days. Amid the protests, the SSC had recommended a CBI probe into the allegations of paper leak following the demands by the protesting job aspirants.
A bench of Justices S A Bobde and L Nageswara Rao asked the Centre to go through the status report and file its reply by November 13.
“We had stayed declaration of results for the examinations as there were prima facie material. It is in the interest of students that whole thing is scrapped and held afresh,” the bench said.
The court said that even after the CBI probe or investigation by any agency, there was no mechanism by which it can be determined who all were tainted and who all were innocents.
“Sometimes a hard decision has to be taken to send a message to those involved that these kind of activities would not benefit and every thing can be washed off,” it said.