Dismissing a petition filed by a few students, the Supreme Court has refused to postpone the NEET-PG exam scheduled for Sunday and said it could not put the careers of nearly 2 lakh candidates at risk.
The entrance exam for post-graduate medical courses, which was initially supposed to be held on June 23, had already been postponed once as a precaution amid the row over the irregularities in NEET-UG.
Seeking that the NEET-PG exam be postponed again, the petitioners said many candidates appearing for the test have been allotted exam centres in cities where it was difficult for them to reach. They said that the National Board of Examinations in Medical Sciences (NBEMS), which conducts the exam, had informed them about the city where they would have to appear for the exam on July 31.
Information about the exam centre, on the other hand, was given only on Thursday when the test was scheduled for Sunday, the students contended, adding that the exam was scheduled to be held in two sessions and the formula for normalisation of scores had not been revealed yet.
Hearing the petition on Friday, a bench of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud and Justices Manoj Misra and JB Pardiwala said it could not order the postponement of the exam just two days before it was supposed to be held.
"How can we postpone such an exam? Nowadays people just come asking to postpone the exam. It's not a perfect world. We are not academic experts," the court said.
Nothing that 2 lakh students were expected to appear for the exam, the bench said it was not inclined to ask for it to be rescheduled just because a few candidates wanted.
"There are 2 lakh students and 4 lakh parents who will be affected. We cannot put the careers of so many candidates at risk just because of these petitioners," the bench remarked.
Previous Postponement
On the night of June 22, a day before NEET-PG was originally supposed to be held, the Centre had announced that the exam would be postponed. The decision was taken amid the row over the NEET-UG paper leaks and was announced shortly after the Centre had said that it was replacing the chief of the National Testing Agency, which conducts the medical exam for undergraduate courses.
Stating that it wanted to "undertake a thorough assessment of the robustness of processes of NEET-PG", the government said the exam had been postponed as a precautionary measure.
Caught off guard, many candidates had been inconvenienced at the time as they had to travel to different cities to appear for the exam. Some had said they had also travelled with their families because they could not leave their little children behind.
