NEET candidates at a center in Visakhapatnam amidst rain. While Madras High Court refused to order a re-test, Madhya Pradesh HC did so, although a Division Bench stayed the order soon. The opposing judgements flesh out the tension between individual rights and systemic stability. | Photo credit: V. Raju/The Hindu
On May 4, candidates across the country filed into their registered examination halls to write the NEET-UG exam, attempted this year by approximately 20.8 lakh students. Some candidates in the States of Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu sitting for the three-hour exam of 180 questions claimed to have faced a problem that they strongly believed had a direct consequence on their performance.
During the exam hours, thunderstorms and bad weather conditions caused power outages in test centres across both States, leading the courts to hear writ petition pleas for re-test and to adjudicate on whether the power outage and its impact on exam performance was strong enough to grant the plea.
In Madhya Pradesh, the petitioner’s argument was that due to “severe thunderstorms” and subsequent power outage the petitioner was forced to give her exam in the dark which affected her performance. Similarly, in Tamil Nadu, the petitioner’s counsel reported power outages from 20 minutes to 1 hour and 15 minutes in various examination centres that affected the candidates’ performance in the exam. This was also attributed to bad weather conditions.
At the MP High Court, it was argued that power was brought back as soon as possible and without CCTV footage it would be difficult to ascertain how much of a disadvantage candidates faced during the outage. The MP High Court also took into account the comparison of number of attempted questions between the petitioning candidates with other candidates who were in the same exam hall.
The defence submitted that in granting a request for a re-test, it would be inherently prejudicial to those that had passed the examination and gotten their result and would seriously affect a “level-playing field”. The petitioning candidates had also attempted a good number of questions, some with 170 out of 180 and from all the affected centres. Eleven students have scores that deemed them toppers of the NEET examination.
However, the court maintained that while they have heard the arguments it was impossible to take this “at face value” and that the “emotions prevailing at the time” could not be determined. In a high-pressure environment, the court stated that while the exam was three hours long, even ten minutes of difficulty in reading and writing would have an effect of “rattling one’s mental condition”.
It also held that in this case, “pitch darkness” did not have to be the metric to determine a student’s ability to see and attempt the paper. “It was not necessary to have zero visibility to be not able to read or write”.
The MP High Court acknowledged the rationale taken the Madras High Court but believed that there was a distinguishable difference between four centres in Tamil Nadu being affected and more than 100 students in Indore petitioning for the re-test. Further, using the principle of equality, the MP High Court chose to lean on Article 14 acknowledging that “unequal conditions” had been created for those who had petitioned the court and that equality must be maintained, granting them their plea for a re-test.
By this time, the Madras High Court had already dismissed the plea from their side. The Madras High Court determined that in early May and especially during peak afternoon hours, there could not have been any significant impact of a power outage regardless of the duration of said outage. On observing footage produced in the court, it was observed that the candidates “seated and continued writing without disturbance or pause”. It was also noted that there was no “abnormal variation” in the number of questions attempted between the affected centres and surrounding centres.
Arguments about the “level-playing” were given more importance by the Madras High Court and the emphasis was largely on maintaining the integrity and functioning of the National Testing Agency, responsible for conducting the exam. By method of their procedure, the NTA was found to have followed protocol diligently and a re-test was considered disruptive in this regard.
Finally, the machinery of allocating seats was given priority, “Any undue delay in the examination or result declaration would have a cascading effect on the nationwide admission process, potentially disrupting the academic year for lakhs of students and affecting seat allocations across medical institutions.”
The opposing judgements are not a unique phenomenon to the federal set-up of the Indian judiciary. However, it does raise the point about the tension between individual rights and systemic stability.
In this case, the principle of proportionality was applied to gain an assessment of how much a candidate’s right to attempt the exam in their full capacity was affected as a direct result of the power outage and whether the consequences of providing relief by means of a re-test would be more damaging to the larger system.
More significantly, the tension is useful when deciding when genuine injustices require intervention and when larger bodies and systems are at greater vulnerability. As of now, the Division Bench of the MP High Court has released a stay on its re-test order given by the single judge bench.
(Zoe is a recent graduate of the Public Policy programme at NLSIU. She combines passion for writing with a deep interest in education policy and economics.)
Published – July 02, 2025 09:52 pm IST
