Citation: CNR No. BRHC010840992026
The Patna High Court has dismissed three NEET-UG 2026 petitions in which candidates claimed that their OMR answer sheets had been swapped or their scores lowered after publication. It held that their only proof, their own downloaded scorecards, was not backed by NTA’s official records, and sent the disputed facts to a civil court.
Pawani Prabha said her 622 marks (rank 2500 in GEN-EWS) fell to 81, and Nisha Kumari said her 611 marks fell to 194 within about ten hours. Priya Kumari said she attempted 169 questions and expected about 560 marks, but the OMR sheet shown on NTA’s website had only 33 questions marked. They claimed an alteration or a deep-rooted conspiracy at NTA. After the court ordered NTA to produce the original OMR sheets, the sheets were shown to the candidates in court, and they said they were not theirs and the signatures were not theirs. NTA said that its records showed one result uploaded only once on 16 July 2026, that the National Informatics Centre certified that there was no change in the OMR sheets or scorecards, and that the petitioners’ scorecards were manipulated, since the QR codes on them led to the original scorecard, and that two candidates cannot have the same rank with different scores. It also pointed out that two of the petitioners had not used the public notice window of 13 to 15 July to challenge the OMR sheets, and that Priya Kumari had challenged only question no. 1, which she had not even attempted. Justice Harish Kumar accepted that a national exam is a “trust-based” exercise in which NTA must show a credible and verifiable record trail, but held that no arbitrariness or mala fides was shown. He noted that the original OMR sheets carried the candidates’ names, signatures, thumb impressions, parents’ names and invigilators’ signatures. Small variations in signatures across documents, he said, cannot prove tampering, since signatures naturally vary, and no ill will against any staff was alleged. The court also refused to treat interim orders from other High Courts as binding precedents. The petitions were dismissed, with liberty to approach a civil court, and the OMR sheets were handed back to NTA.