Madras High Court clears decks for NEET result declaration

Chennai: Decks have been cleared for the declaration of results of NEET (UG) 2025 examination with the Madras high court on Friday dismissing a batch of petitions, which sought to restrain the National Testing Agency (NTA) from declaring the results.

In their petitions, S Sai Priya and 15 other students also sought a direction to the NTA to conduct re-examination for candidates, who had experienced power outages at four centres in Chennai, where they appeared for the examination.

Dismissing the petitions, Justice C Kumarappan said, "In the instant cases, I do not find any mala fides on the part of the respondents. Furthermore, all over India, there were about 22 lakhs students have participated in the NEET (UG) 2025 examination." Against this background, if any re-examination is permitted on trivial grounds, the same would seriously affect the level playing field of more than two million candidates. Hence, the court does not find any merit in these writ petitions.

In an interim order, a vacation judge had on May 17 restrained NTA from releasing the results of NEET-2025 due to alleged difficulties faced by a group of students because of power outage at four examination centres.

In his order, Justice Kumarappan said "If we look at the contention of the petitioners, the main ground urged by them is that on account of power outage, there was poor light in the Centres, which caused a distracting environment, and hampered the candidates' ability to concentrate and to perform at their best".

It was pertinent to mention here that the power outage happened due to sudden rain and storm. As rightly contended by the Additional Solicitor General, the examination was conducted during day time between 2.00 PM to 5.00 PM, where there was a natural ambient light, the judge added.

When the authority (NTA), after field verification and with the scientific method, had arrived at a reasonable conclusion that there are no grounds for re-examination, the same needs to be accepted, unless the said report is tainted with mala fides", the judge added.