New Delhi:The Supreme Court on Friday stayed an order of the Madurai bench of Madras High Court awarding 196 grace marks to NEET students who had opted to write the examination in Tamil language on account of error in translation.
A bench of Justices S A Bobde and L Nageswara Rao stayed the order and issued notice on a plea of the CBSE challenging the high court order.
The bench posted the matter for hearing after two weeks and asked the parties to come out with a solution to deal with the situation, saying, “We cannot dole out marks in this fashion”.
The bench observed that it appears that after the judgment, the students who opted for the Tamil language are in the advantageous position over others.
The Madurai bench of the Madras High Court had on July 10 ordered the CBSE to grant 196 marks — 4 marks each for 49 erroneously translated questions — in the Tamil version of this year’s NEET to the students who took the exam in the regional language.
Earlier on Thursday, Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Prakash Javadekar said that the Centre would be taking affidavits from state governments on accuracy of translated NEET question papers from next year.
The minister was responding to an issue raised by AIADMK member Vijila Sathyananth in Rajya Sabha regarding the inaccurate translation of NEET questions in Tamil and the problems faced by students.
Javadekar said as the matter was in court, he would not speak much on the issue. He, however, said the translators were provided by the Tamil Nadu government.
The Minister further said from the next year, the Centre would be taking an affidavit from state governments that the translation done by their language experts was correct.
The National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) is conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education for admission to MBBS/BDS courses.