Around 100 members of the National Students Union of India (NSUI) — the Congress’s student wing — on Thursday afternoon barged into the National Testing Agency (NTA) office in Delhi’s Okhla and locked it from inside in protest against the alleged paper leak in the NEET-UG, held on May 5.
The protesters stormed the NTA office, holding chains and locks while raising the slogan “NTA bandh karo (shut down NTA)”, and locked the office from inside.
Later, police and security forces arrived at the scene and dispersed the crowd gathered inside the testing agency office.
The NTA is under fire over the alleged paper leak and other irregularities in this year’s NEET-UG.
Earlier in the day, members of the Congress’s youth wing — the Indian Youth
Congress — protested near Parliament as President Droupadi Murmu addressed a joint session.
Carrying placards and chanting slogans against the Centre, the Youth Congress members also held a demonstration near Jantar Mantar.
The police lathi-charged and detained several protesters after they tried to
break barricades. Youth Congress members said it was a “Parliament gherao” and they would continue their march again on Friday, highlighting how the allegations of paper leaks and irregularities had led to significant unrest among students and parents across the country.
Youth Congress chief B.V. Srinivas said thousands of the outfit's workers had taken to Delhi's streets on Thursday, “becoming the voice of students suffering from the atrocities of paper leak”. He alleged the police brutally beat up several protesting Youth Congressmembers.
The Opposition is likely to raise the issue in Parliament on Friday.
Sources said the INDIA bloc parties would give a notice in the Rajya Sabha on the NEET paper leak row, and plan to serve an adjournment notice on the matter in the Lok Sabha.
NTA denial
The NTA on Thursday denied allegations of carelessness in handling students’ answer sheets for the Central University Entrance Test Undergraduate (CUET-UG) 2024.
“These are empty boxes kept outside the hall at NTA and do not have any sensitive material inside them. Never did we keep these boxes in open, as being reported by the media. Also, we have sufficient number of security personnel deployed at the place where boxes are kept,” the agency said in a post on X.
The clarification from the NTA came after several videos, claiming the CUET-UG 2024 answer sheets were lying unattended, unsealed and in the open at the NTA office, went viral on social media.
Thursday’s statement comes a few days after the NTA had had to issue a clarification against another report, which claimed the agency’s website had been hacked.
“NTA website and all its web portals are fully secure. Any information that they have been compromised and hacked is wrong and misleading,” the NTA said in the clarification on June 23.
