The Madras High Court on Wednesday granted interim stay orders on publishing the results National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), which is likely scheduled to be declared in June.
When the petition, which was filed by a group of students, who took the exam on May 7, came up for hearing Madras High Court of Madurai bench Justice M V
Muralidaran also asked the CBSE not to publish the results till June 7 until further orders.
The court order came on the ground that discrimination would arise among students if there is different type of question papers in different languages. The CBSE had conducted the NEET 2017 test in English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Odisa and Assamese.
The petitioners claimed that all NEET exams, which was conducted in different languages, did not have a uniform question paper. In their plea, the students also claimed that the question paper was easy in some languages.
Citing an example, the petitioners alleged that the question paper in Tamil was much easier than in English. The students also argued that the CBSE had denied them a level playing field by setting different question papers.
The petition said that the NEET question paper should the same for the whole country. "Otherwise, assessment of intelligence and aptitude will differ. Further, an uneven playing field would infringe the right to equal opportunity in education", the petition said.
Few days back, the court had sought the response of Union health secretary, CBSE among other stakeholders, on a petition, which was filed by a mother of a medical aspiration, for cancellation of the NEET 2017 for admissions to MBBS and BDS courses.
Stating that the evaluation system is violating Article 14 of the Constitution which prescribes equal treatment of all the candidates on merit in the process of selection without any prejudices and concession, the petitioner prayed for the cancellation of the process of selection under NEET and sought to issue order to the CBSE not to declare the test conducted on May 7.
The petitioner has also sought court's direction to re-conduct NEET with same set of questions of all major languages in India.
Published 24 May 2017, 14:40 IST