HC seeks probe on NEET marksheet manipulation

Justice N Anand Venkatesh before whom the plea moved by a student from Coimbatore came up, wherein from October 5 to 16 the marks obtained stood at 594 and was reduced to 248, said, “If manipulations are possible, with everything happening online, the OMR Sheet of a bright student can always be swapped with that of a mediocre student and none can find out the truth.” Pointing out this is only a fear expressed by the court and that it is never proven right, the judge said, “Even if there is a remote chance of manipulating the OMR sheet, that is a clear harbinger of the malady it can cause to the selection process. This court is taking this issue very seriously since these candidates are future doctors.” Observing that the court initially was not convinced to dig deep, since the OMR uploaded on the website was also physically shown to the petitioner, the judge said, “The Additional Rejoinder filed by the petitioner based on the account retrieved from Google, changed the case. These materials substantiate that there were two OMR sheets that were uploaded on the website.” He also pointed out that though several other similar cases which came up for consideration did not truly reflect the actual answers given by the candidates, the court did not go deep into those cases since there was only one OMR sheet that was available and therefore, this court did not question that OMR sheet merely based on the ipse dixit of the candidate.

However, this case came as a surprise to the court and made it think that probably there was some truth in the claim made by those students, Justice Anand Venkatesh said while noting that if such manipulation is in fact possible, it is really a danger which requires immediate investigation.