The Supreme Court will hear next week, a petition filed by the candidates of NEET-UG 2025, who suffered power outages at different centres in Madhya Pradesh during the examination, seeking re-test.
The matter was mentioned before the Bench of Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi, which agreed to list it for hearing next week.
The counsel appearing for the candidates sought urgent listing on the grounds that the counselling was about to start on July 21.
The Apex Court observed that there were several rounds of counselling. If the petitioners succeeded in the case, they would be able to attend the counselling session later, it added.
The petition challenged the Madhya Pradesh High Court order, which refused to direct a re-test for the NEET-UG 2025 candidates, who were affected by power outage at the centres in Indore and Ujjain.
A single-judge Bench of the High Court had directed the National Testing Agency to conduct re-test of the NEET-UG 2025 exam for candidates the power outage-affected candidates. It observed that since the petitioners were put at a disadvantage for no fault of theirs, a re-test was necessary. It further directed that the counselling process would be subject to the re-test.
A Division Bench, however, set aside the single-judge Bench order last week after taking into consideration an expert committee report, which said that even though there was power outage at some centres, there was sufficient natural light enabling the candidates to take the test.
The Division Bench further noted that only 70 out of the 27,264 students had filed the original writ petitions.