'Shocked' Delhi HC Imposes Fine On NEET UG Candidate Over Manipulation With OMR Sheet

New Delhi: Expressing "shock" over a medical aspirant’s attempt to manipulate the OMR sheet filed by her while appearing for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) UG-2023, the Delhi High Court has imposed Rs 20,000 as costs on the woman, making it clear that such an attempt cannot be tolerated in court of law.

Judge Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav said he intended to impose hefty costs on the petitioner woman and to refer the matter to the police but refrained from doing so in view of her tender age.

The high court’s judgment came on a petition by a medical aspirant from Andhra Pradesh seeking direction to NTA to produce her original OMR sheet along with the answer key of the exam, recompute her marks and publish fresh result and merit list. The petitioner also sought direction for allotting her MBBS seat for the academic Year of NEET (UG)-2023 in any government medical college in Kerala or Andhra Pradesh. According to the plea, NTA declared the results on June 13 and her all India rank for counselling was shown as 351. The plea said the petitioner was shocked while registering on the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) website when she was unable to move to the next step of registration. She claimed her aggregate marks were reduced to 103 and rank downgraded to 12,530,32 with a percentile of 38.4.

She said she made a complaint to the authorities and, when no steps were taken to redress her grievance, she approached the court. However, NTA contended that the OMR sheet shown by the petitioner was tampered with and modified, and the responses provided by her on the it were deliberately altered in an attempt to claim higher marks in the examination.