Supreme Court stays TN HC’s Neet order

New Delhi: Observing that the Madras high court cannot dole out 196 marks to students across the board, the Supreme Court on Friday stayed the high court order directing award of additional marks to candidates who took the Neet examination in Tamil.

The high court had asked the CBSE not to proceed with the process of second counselling for admission to MBBS and BDS courses. With the apex court staying this order, admission process can proceed further.

A bench of Justices S.A. Bobde and L. Nageswara Rao said it appears that after the judgment of the Madurai bench of the high court, the students who had opted for the Tamil language are in an advantageous position over others.

The top court granted the stay while acting on an appeal filed by the CBSE. The court added that award of such additional marks across the board for all the 23,000 and odd students who took Neet exam in Tamil would upset the ongoing counselling process. Further, when the first counselling has been completed and admissions had already been made, revising the rank list would result in chaos.

The bench agreed with the CBSE submission that an information bulletin of the Neet had said that in case of any ambiguity in the bilingual texts, the English version would be treated as final. The bulletin had clarified that “candidates opting for regional languages would be provided bilingual test booklets in selected regional languages and in English. In case of any ambiguity in translation of any of the questions, its English version shall be treated as final.

When senior counsel Siddharth Luthra and Prasad pointed out that the translation was so absurd that “cheetah” was translated as “Sita” instead of “Siruthai”, the bench said, “it is true that the translation is inaccurate and misleading” but “doling out marks to all is not the solution”. The bench wondered as to what would be the fate of those students from Tamil Nadu who chose to take Neet test in English and not in Tamil. How can they be discriminated?     

The CBSE, along with 20 affected students, submitted that the high court had erroneously passed the order at this stage, saying the key words in Tamil questions were wrongly translated from English and this caused confusion among the students. There were 180 questions with a total mark of 720 in the NEET.

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