A Division Bench of the Madras High Court, on Thursday (July 3, 2025), affirmed a single judge’s order against the re-conduct of National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test – Undergraduate (NEET-UG) 2025 for the students who appeared at centres which suffered power disruption due to heavy rains on May 4.
The Division Bench comprising Justices J. Nisha Banu and M. Jothiraman dismissed a writ appeal filed jointly by a group of candidates by concurring with the submissions of Additional Solicitor General AR.L. Sundaresan that the power disruption had no significant impact in the performance of the petitioners in the test.
The Bench upheld Justice C. Kumarappan’s June 6 decision to not order re-conduct of NEET-UG 2025 and said, the single judge had rightly concluded that any court order for conduct of re-examination would severely affect the prospects of more than two million candidates.
While challenging the single judge’s order, the appellants had contended that there was complete breakdown of exam conditions at the centres where there was power outage due to heavy rainfall and therefore, the candidates in those centres had lost the advantage of writing the exams in conditions on a par with those in other centres.
However, Mr. Sundaresan produced CCTV footage from the examination centres before the Division Bench to show that the examination halls had large windows with glass panes which allowed ambient daylight to enter the rooms and that there was highly negligible disruption due to the rains and power outage.
He also pointed out one of the candidates in the examination centre in question had answered 179 out of 180 questions and five other candidates had answered 140 out of 180 questions. He said, there was no difference in the performance of candidates who suffered power outage at their centres and others.
He further stated the NTA had constituted an independent expert committee for conducting an on-ground assessment to find out if there was any impact on candidates’ performance due to the power outage at some centres and that the committee had conducted a statistical analysis before giving a categorical finding that there was no such impact.
Finding force in his submissions, the Division Bench wrote: “This court is of the opinion that it is crucial to uphold the integrity of the educational assessments in conducting examinations and this court cannot sit in an appellate jurisdiction against the considered decision of the speaking order passed by the NTA, after field verification of examination centres and statistical analysis by an independent expert committee with no affiliation to the NTA, unless such decision is demonstrated to be manifestly arbitrary, mala fide or illegal.”
Taking note that as many as 22 lakh candidates had appeared for NEET-UG 2025 and that the entire rank list would get disrupted if a re-examination was ordered for select candidates, the Bench said: “Therefore, we do not find any reason to interfere with the order impugned (under challenge) and the writ appeal lacks merit and the same is liable to be dismissed.”
