2024 NEET scam was not “widespread”, it was only localised !- Supreme Court.

👆This was how the Supreme Court (under CJI T.S. Thakur) decided the matter when there was a question paper leak and ongoing investigation in 2015.

I think that this was the correct decision. It was in accordance with the well known Latin maxim ” falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus ” – false in one, false in all.

In the 2024 NEET scam case, the Supreme Court (under CJI D.Y.Chandrachud) has ruled the exact opposite in spite of overwhelming evidence of (1) paper leak in at least 155 cases, (2) sting videos and sting audios of scamsters, (3) arrests of dozens of culprits and recovery of post-dated cheques, (4) suspicious mark inflation in some centres, (5) instances of students who failed in class 12 exam topping NEET, etc.

I don’t think that you can ever get more or better evidence than this. But according to the SC, this doesn’t prove that the scam was “widespread”, it was only localised!

There is a saying that if you see a cockroach, you can be sure that it is not an isolated one. There is a whole colony of cockroaches nearby. You just have to look a little harder.

Both economies of scale and the limited shelf life of the leaked question papers make it unviable for the scamsters to operate only in a few places and on a smaller scale. The scam should necessarily be widespread and on a very large scale to be worth the very high risk taken .

In my years in the government, whenever I had noticed any irregularity or shortcoming in a district in the course of my field visits, I invariably found that the same irregularities/shortcomings were present in other districts as well.

In the same way, if there is a particular pattern of malpractices in the NEET exam in some centres, it is naive to think that they are confined to just the few places the CBI/Police investigation has so far unearthed the scam. And, in these days of the Internet, email and WhatsApp, a leaked question paper can be sent all over the country in a matter of seconds.

The SC should have followed its own 2015 precedent or explained why that precedent was wrong.

By not ordering a re-exam of the scam-ridden NEET 2024 exam, I believe that grave harm has been done to the examination ecosystem. Hereafter, scamsters will have a free run, and examining bodies will not cancel exams even when several cases of paper leak are reported because the SC itself has held that cancellation is not warranted unless the scam is “widespread”. As to what is “widespread”, that is left to the wisdom of the SC on a case by case basis. The 2024 NEET judgment is the ADM Jabalpur-equivalent with regard to examinations.
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The first arrests in the latest NEET scam were made in the 1st week of May 2024 itself.

The first PIL was filed in mid-May 2024.

In 2015, the Vacation Bench of the Supreme Court had itself passed final orders, and it did so expeditiously, in mid-June.

This time, the Vacation Bench made high-sounding declarations like “we won’t tolerate even 0.001% of illegality in the exam process” but dragged the matter on unnecessarily for 6 weeks. It also didn’t stay the Counseling process which was an early indicator of how the Court was likely to rule.

The CJI-led Bench dragged the matter on by another 3 weeks.

IIT-Madras made a ludicrous data analysis to show that the scam was “not widespread” – an analysis that was ridiculed by Professors of other IITs.

There was also the farcical drama of Professors of IIT-Delhi being asked to solve one particular question (that had ambiguous answers) and being reported widely by the godi media as if the fate of the NEET exam hinged on that one question!

The argument that students will be put to hardship if they have to take the exam again is crap. Students will be put to hardship only if the scam-ridden exam is not cancelled and unscrupulous elements are allowed to retain their unfair advantage.

A delay of a few weeks or even a couple of months hardly matters when the lives and careers of so many students are on the line and when the government spends about Rs.1 crore on each student of a government medical college. This is like saying that we must go ahead with the inauguration of a building, road or bridge even though the construction is shoddy because rectifying the defects will delay the inauguration.

All in all, this was a very sorry episode, a lower low in Indian judicial history, and the ADM Jabalpur case-equivalent of examinations.

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