The Supreme Court on Friday refused to reschedule the postgraduate National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET-PG) 2024 fixed for August 11.

A three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud pointed out that two lakh aspirants were expected to appear in the exam.

“More than two lakh students and close to four lakh parents will weep over the weekend if we even touch this matter… Nowadays people just come to postpone this exam or the other,” Chief Justice Chandrachud remarked.

Noting that there were only five petitioners in the Supreme Court, the CJI said “we cannot put the careers of so many candidates at risk just because of these petitioners”.

Appearing for the petitioners, senior advocate Sanjay Hegde submitted that the controversy over paper leaks and allocation of exam centres in the undergraduate NEET 2024 exam had had an impact on NEET-PG 2024.

“What happened in NEET UG has affected the NEET PG. Exam centres were cut down from 1,200 to 500,” Mr. Hegde said. The petitioners had sought postponement of the NEET-PG exam claiming that candidates were allocated cities inconvenient for them to reach.

The CJI, at this point, wondered who was really behind petitions seeking reschedulement of exams. “We don’t know who is behind these petitions, We are not talking about your clients… but a larger number of centres always serves the purpose of those who want to cheat the system,” the Chief Justice remarked.

Noting that the court was not in favour of rescheduling the exam, Mr. Hegde said the Bench should at least intervene with a direction to the authorities to hold one exam per day.

He said the current schedule was grueling with two exams, one paper in the morning and the second one in the afternoon, a day.

“Then it will be normalised. Normalisation will lead to other problems… Normalisation is inherently problematic,” Mr. Hegde submitted.

But the court did not budge. The CJI said, “it is not a perfect world and we are not academic experts. Three of us cannot be expected to sit down and devise a new policy better than the existing one”.

The Chief Justice said that while the petitioners were rooting for idealistic remedies, the court had to consider the complexities of society and the challenges of necessarily conducting large exams in an “extremely diverse, geographically diverse, physically diverse, culturally diverse nation”.

The NEET-PG exam was initially supposed to be held on June 23. It was postponed by the Union Health Ministry as a “precautionary measure” in the wake of alleged irregularities in certain competitive exams.

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