NEET: Tamil medium students given Hindi question paper in Madurai

Nearly 100 Tamil medium NEET aspirants were given question papers in Hindi at a centre in Madurai and the pupils were later provided with the Tamil version after a delay of about three hours.

The incident happened at a matriculation school, a NEET centre, where a school official said when a question paper pack was opened and distribution began for four halls in the centre they came to know that they were in Hindi.

Students in these four halls were, however, Tamil medium students and they told them that they could answer only in Tamil. There was no confusion in respect of question papers for other rooms in the centre since they were in English and Tamil, she said.

The school official said they apprised the local NEET/CBSE coordinators.

After taking their directions, question papers in Tamil were arranged and there was a delay of about three hours due to it, the official said.

Since there was a delay, the students were provided lunch and refreshments, she added.

Asked on the incident, a senior CBSE official in Chennai told PTI that the "NEET unit" has taken care of it.

Standing instructions are there to handle such situations and students were given full three hours to write their examination, he said.

About 1.07 lakh candidates took NEET exams across 170 centres in 10 cities in Tamil Nadu.

In Chennai, about 33,000 took their examination at 49 centres, the official said adding there were very negligible absentees.

To a query, he said there were some cases of students turning up late for their examinations.

He said nothing can be done to relax timings since these were mandatory for everyone.

Asked about an aspirant's claim in Salem that she was not allowed to write the exam despite having a hall ticket, he said the name of the student did not appear in the list of candidates.

"Subsequently, after checking, the hall ticket was found to be fake. In such cases we were directed to lodge a police complaint...they (aspirant and those who accompanied her) left the centre," he said.