If No NEET Leak, Why The Arrests, And Other Unanswered Questions

Students protest against the NTA and the Centre over the NEET row

New Delhi: New questions have emerged in the NEET-UG case regarding the over a dozen arrests made by the Bihar Police and the CBI even after the National Testing Agency claimed that the question papers for admissions in medical colleges were not leaked.

Sources said a key question is why would the police in Patna and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrest the people if there was no paper leak?

Investigators suspect that at least 15 students from other states gave the NEET-UG at a particular centre in Gujarat’s Godhra, from where many have been arrested too.

In Bahadurgarh, the principal of the school that served as an exam centre claimed that students got enough time to finish their papers, but the National Testing Agency (NTA) still gave them grace marks.

For the first time in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET undergraduate or UG), the number of students scoring 700 had increased five times. The number of students who got over 710 rose by 900 per cent. The spike is such that 23 students scored 710 out of 720 marks in 2021, 12 in 2022, 48 in 2023, and 500 this year.

Sources said another ostensibly suspicious matter was the NTA’s delayed response to the Bihar government’s request for information about the series of papers set on fire on May 19. The NTA gave the information only on June 21 after much reprimand by the Union Home Secretary.

CBI sources said they have gathered enough evidence to show the paper leak happened just hours before the NEET exam began in Bihar’s Hazaribagh. The NTA, however, maintains no question paper was found missing from storage.

There are also allegations that screenshots of fake question papers were edited to make them seem genuine and circulated among students and others in a bid to sabotage the exam. This indicates some vested interests want to make the NEET exam controversial.

Earlier, it was told that 1,600 students may have benefited from the allegedly leaked NEET-UG papers. Later, it was claimed only 153 students may have benefited, but there is no information about these 153 students, such as where was their exam centre?

Sources said only 11 people in the NTA have been entrusted with the responsibility of conducting offline and online exams of more than 50 lakh students. They collect Rs 250 crore a year from the NEET exam alone, but spend only Rs 90 crore in conducting the exam.

On Wednesday, the Centre told the Supreme Court there was neither any indication of “mass malpractice” nor a localised set of candidates being benefitted leading to abnormal scores in NEET-UG 2024. It said the data analytics of results of NEET-UG 2024 was conducted by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and as per the findings given by the experts, the marks distribution follows the bell-shaped curve that is seen in any large-scale examination indicating no abnormality.